Its been a wasteland. Asking for codes, following up getting ghosted like a 14 year old kid trying to figure out why the chick seemed into him but is now ignoring him.

Then Boom!

A code lands in my inbox at 9:14 in the morning than another at 9:21, 3 more show up while I am already deep in a game where some shirtless man is yelling about destiny and swinging a sword the size of a Honda Civic.
Here we are. At the end of a dead season and 5 seperate large games all drop code, with embargoes less than 1 hour away from one another on a 3 day period.
No complaints here really I love it. But it goes a long way to describe how shit gets rough and why sometimes it can seem like I go into hibernation.

Busy seasons in games are glorious. They are also a bit like being locked in a candy store where every piece of candy demands forty hours, two patches, a performance test, a story analysis, a combat breakdown, some AI stupidity, a look at the UI, the sound, the price, the platform versions, then probably a conversation about whether the horse physics deserve prison time. And lastly the damned candy had a pr campaign and then showed up 2 weeks late to the story.
And your at the mercy of whatever is available.

People see the reviews that get made. They do not always see the pile behind them. The codes waiting. The emails. The game that arrived late. The game that arrived early but had a review window infected by a conga line of bugs because the difference between a reviewable game and none reviewable one can be really small. The smaller title with a weird idea that looks like it was made by three people in a garage, one old computer, two cans of energy drink, and a personal vendetta against modern UI design, are often the games that grab me. But they are many times harder to get. Because sometimes the indie dev or even AA devs only 1 have PR person on staff.

My system is mostly first come, first served. I do not care if the code comes from a massive company with enough money to build a second moon or a new studio trying to get someone, anyone, to notice their strange little monster game. If it lands first and I have time, that is what gets played. If I am already buried in work, I am buried in work, thats just how it goes. A bigger logo on the email doesn’t magically add six hours to the day, though I am sure some executive somewhere has tried to put that in a PowerPoint.

That can mean I miss things. Sometimes I pick a title because it looks interesting, because the idea reminds me of something I used to love, or catches my eye, because it is new, because I have a feeling it might have something nobody else is doing. Sometimes I find a game with real ideas, strange systems, honest ambitions, a little roughness around the edges but a soul inside it! Sometimes I’m wrong and I spend a weekend discovering that a game can have seventy crafting materials, four currencies, fifteen menus, and still feel like it was designed by a man angrily throwing ideas at a wall just to pay his bills.

That chaos is part of the job!

I try to cover the games I think are worth your time, your money, your patience, your hard drive space, and occasionally your willingness to forgive a character who says “we are stronger together” right before the game asks you to collect twelve glowing mushrooms from a cave ruled by an enemy that doesn’t apparently need to eat or shit, or think, or write home to its mama. I do not always get the call right. Nobody does. What I can do is give the games a real look once they are in front of me, explain what works, explain what does not, and tell you when something is hiding under the usual marketing sludge.

Why do it?

The busy periods feed my brain. The more games there are, the better. I like the contrast. One day it is a huge cinematic blockbuster where every wall looks like it cost more than my childhood home, the next it is a tiny tactical game with crunchy systems and a soundtrack that sounds like an old computer became haunted. That variety is why I love games in the first place.

So when the review pile gets insane, its time to put on your thinking caps just like me and understand that its not some perfect running well oiled machine where every release gets processed in the same order by a tired robot with a clipboard. It is one person choosing, playing, testing, writing, trying to find the interesting stuff, and occasionally gets absolutely fucking flattened by the release calendar like a cartoon character under a piano.

“Join the best damned podcast and patreon ever
https://www.patreon.comAngryCentaurGaming”

The math on live service games is so brain-meltingly simple that it’s almost insulting to even type it out. You’re looking at a world where Sony’s own financials show their live service titles account for more than 40 percent of first-party revenue, Tencent’s Honor of Kings pulls in nearly $2 billion in a single year, Fortnite has cranked out over $40 billion since 2017 like it’s printing money in a basement somewhere And yet here we are, watching people genuinely surprised that Sony’s not packing up their bags and heading home after Concord ate shit. It’s like watching someone act shocked that casinos keep building new hotels after one roulette table goes cold—the house still wins, folks, and the winnings are absolutely obscene.

People want so badly for Sony to just fold their hand and walk away from live service games that they’re ignoring the most obvious truth in gaming: money talks and everything else walks, especially when that money is measured in billions.
By the way I don’t play too many service games, so this isn’t man saying oh ya baby. Sony’s president comes out and says yeah, they’re staying in the game, they want to revitalize the market, they believe in live service on a global level, and half the internet acts like this is some kind of surprise. Meanwhile, Genshin Impact made nearly $400 million in its first two months. That’s not a typo. That’s not even good—that’s generational wealth on a scale that makes your average AAA single-player hit look like god damned lemonade stand. The economics aren’t just favorable, they’re practically rigged.

Let’s get this straight right now: Sony’s never been closer to abandoning live service games than I am to getting a PR job. The president says all the right words about global appeal and continuous content delivery and new challenges, but let’s cut through the corporate speak and look at what actually matters. Honor of Kings made $13 billion from in-app purchases alone since 2015. Fortnite generates an estimated $6 billion annually and sits on a lifetime pile of cash exceeding $40 billion. A single limited-edition skin in Honor of Legends made the game $22 million in one day. One day. You think Sony’s looking at those numbers and thinking about throwing in the towel because one hero shooter flopped? That’s not how this business works. That’s never how this business has worked.

Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening here because some people seem to be having real trouble connecting the dots. Here’s the thing—that statement wasn’t news. That wasn’t a pivot. That wasn’t some dramatic course correction. That was just Sony confirming what anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention already knew. The idea that Sony would abandon live service games because Concord cratered is like assuming McDonald’s is going to stop selling burgers because one guy didn’t like his Filet-O-Fish.

Consider what you’re looking at in the mobile and live service space right now. Honor of Kings, Tencent’s MOBA that’s basically League of Legends for your phone, earned $1.7 billion in 2025 alone and has piled up over $13 billion in lifetime revenue since it launched in 2015. That’s not a typo. That’s not some weird accounting trick. That’s real money from people buying virtual cosmetics and seasonal passes and limited-time event items. And it’s not even close to alone in this space. Fortnite has generated more than $40 billion in lifetime revenue since its 2017 launch, making it one of the most profitable entertainment properties in human history. Also many of these games are doing this without charging people a single upfront dollar to play.

Genshin Impact offers another perfect case study in just how powerful hot anime chicks with colorful graphics can get a service game over the financial guesswork. The game from miHoYo generated like $393 million during its first two months following its September 2020 launch, averaging more than $6 million a day. That’s $6 million every single day, from a game that costs nothing to download. By the end of its first month, it had made $245 million, and in the second month it still pulled in another $148 million despite the expected post-launch drop-off.

The title became the number two revenue-generating mobile game worldwide during that period, beaten only by PUBG Mobile, and it achieved this as a brand new IP developed in China that somehow became an international hit. The average player in live service games like this spends over $100 a year on cosmetics and battle passes and convenience items, and when you multiply that across millions of players, you’re looking at money that makes traditional game sales look like chump change.

These are mainstream juggernauts sucking up consumer spending at a rate that would have seemed impossible a decade ago. And the most telling part is that these aren’t new launches finding their footing—these are established titles that have figured out how to turn player engagement into a reliable revenue stream that just keeps delivering year after year.

Even Sony’s own financials make it painfully obvious why they’re not going anywhere near the exit door. As I wrote earlier, Live service games made up over 40 percent of Sony’s first-party revenue in Q1 FY25, and that’s without even factoring in a significant single-player release during that quarter. The games driving this revenue—Helldivers 2, MLB The Show, and Bungie’s Destiny 2—are contributing to sales and profits in what Sony describes as a stable manner. Nearly half of Sony’s first-party software revenue is coming from games that keep generating money long after their initial launch window. That’s the kind of financial stability that traditional one-and-done releases simply can’t match, and it’s exactly why every major publisher is desperate to crack this code.f

With a standard single-player game, you get one big sales window and then revenue trails off to basically nothing. With a successful live service, you’re looking at years of consistent income from a relatively small ongoing investment. Sure, you’ve got server costs and you’ve got IP licensing fees if you’re using someone else’s characters, but those are nothing compared to the continued revenue stream. A service game can make a couple hundred million dollars and still be considered mediocre in this space.

The hardware angle is another piece of this puzzle that nobody talks about nearly enough. We’re looking at a gaming landscape where console prices are pushing $600 to $700 and PC hardware keeps getting more expensive thanks to RAM prices that refuse to cooperate and manufacturing costs that keep climbing. But service games? Those notoriously don’t need bleeding-edge graphics to succeed. They can run on older hardware, they can play on mid-range PCs, and they’re accessible to a massive audience of players who might not have the cash to drop on a next-gen system but absolutely have enough money to spend $20 on some skins and a battle pass. That money doesn’t magically leave the industry. It stays right there in the gaming ecosystem, and companies like Sony are absolutely thinking about how to capture it. In a very real sense, these games act as a way to keep consumer dollars circulating within the industry itself rather than disappearing into other entertainment sectors.

What’s genuinely fascinating about the reaction to Sony’s continued commitment to live service is how focused everyone is on the failures while somehow ignoring the mountain of evidence showing why publishers keep betting on this model. Concord flopped. Fair enough. But look at what’s actually working. Look at Helldivers 2, which Sony has described as a huge success that’s seeing increased engagement across platforms after its Xbox launch. The successes aren’t just notable—they’re monetarily massive enough that even multiple failures won’t wipe out the gains from one true hit.

The surprise around Sony’s statement says way more about how gaming discourse works than it does about actual business strategy. First many of us don’t like the titles. Sure thats a thing but I don’t like cancer but I still know a bunch about it.
For some reason in games we fixate on failures because they’re dramatic and they fit this narrative of corporations getting their comeuppance for being greedy or out of touch. But business doesn’t run on narrative satisfaction. It runs on numbers. And those numbers are screaming that live service games, when done right, are among the most profitable entertainment products ever created.

The company has already taken hits, most notably the $766 million impairment loss recorded against Bungie in FY2025 tied to Destiny 2 and Marathon’s underwhelming performance, but even with that massive write-down, Sony’s gaming division still saw profits rise 12 percent year-over-year. Without those charges, operating profit growth would have been closer to 45 percent. That’s the cushion that success provides, and it’s exactly why publishers are willing to roll the dice on live service investments despite the very real risk of failure.

So yeah, Sony’s president said they’re staying in the live service game, and yeah, that means they’re going to keep taking on challenges in a genre where the rewards can be generational. That’s not news. That’s just basic financial literacy in action. Concord dying doesn’t change the math it doesn’t magically mean 2+2 equal Q. Destiny 2 falling short of expectations doesn’t change the math. Marathon struggling to find an audience doesn’t change the math. They’re just going to keep evolving, keep refining, and keep printing money for whoever manages to crack the code.

And right now the financials make sense to keep trying to crack that code.

https://www.patreon.com/cw/AngryCentaurGaming

But Zelnick didn’t confirm a price. Because of course he didn’t. Confirming a price would mean the conversation is over, and Take-Two benefits from this conversation being loud and stupid and ongoing, and back and forth, and filled with their own name like a fucking Jason Derulo song. What he, as in Zelnik, did drop was what might be the most rehearsed corporate sentence of the entire week.

Their goal, he said, is to deliver something that feels like it costs “way, way, way less than the value.” It was literally a 3 way. Three “ways.” That’s not a mistake. That’s a man who practiced that specific number of “ways” in a bathroom mirror like he was summoning the blood mary of videogames.

Now on paper that sounds reassuring, like your landlord telling you the rent increase is “reasonable”, or the itch is “treatable” In practice it sounds like someone handing you a restaurant menu with no dollar signs anywhere and the waiter just winking at you when you ask how much the lobster is. Technically comforting. Spiritually its god damned terrifying. The underlying message here isn’t subtle either. They know people are scared to death of a hundred dollar price tag, and they are very carefully, very deliberately, not saying “that’s ridiculous,” which is exactly why everyone with a brain cell and a Steam account, who already has to wait a “unknown” amount of time to get a port, thinks its probably going to roll in at like 89.99 or 99.99 because lets be honest neither are 100.00 lol.

Now to be fair, which is a shit saying as nothing is fair, there is a logic behind the madness. If any game on the planet could even attempt to justify pushing the pricing ceiling through the roof it would be this one. We are talking about a project with rumored development costs that float somewhere in the multi-billion dollar range, a map that will probably require its own zip code, years of post-launch support already baked into the business plan, and an online ecosystem that will consume entire friend groups like a black hole made of micro-transactions and shark cards and whatever new horrifying monetization they’ve cooked up in the lab since 2013. From a pure hours played per dollar perspective this thing could end up being one of the best value propositions in the history of gaming outside of you know, 1000 other games. That’s right. I led you down a path right there because there are a ton of games with a ton of game-play, literally thousands of hours of it.

But here’s the problem and it’s a big one.
Sympathy and resource guilt are weapons. They want you to feel it of course. For every “only 5” people worked on this game bullshit stampede to stories of crunch or novels written about developers traveling to Barcalona so they can perfectly replicate a bulls nuts that only lives in one particular field, so they can put it into their new steer husbandry game. Effort is effective, sympathy is sexy and GTA doesn’t have that. So they do have to go with the dollar to size perspective.

But at some point it needs to stop. Frankly why the fuck should a gamer have to care about that shit? Why should a random gamer care how long a game took, or how many devs worked on it? Or how many years of sexless crunch filled lives were extinguished under the brutal hand of Rocksith commanders?

The industry has spent the last several years slowly nudging prices upward from sixty to seventy with deluxe editions and ultimate editions and super mega editions quietly creeping into triple digit territory while nobody was really paying attention, and now everyone is standing around waiting for the moment some publisher finally breaks the glass ceiling on purpose and in broad daylight.

These dudes could be the first. Well outside of Virtu-racing and a couple other Genesis games back when Sega was so souped up on their own success that they pointed at their system and just made up Blast Processing. Like a DMT user seeing a Space elf.

And that’s where this whole thing stops being about one game and starts being about the entire industry.

The launch price of GTA 6 isn’t just a number on a box. It’s a signal flare, but its inside a football stadium. Sure it could signal everyone is going to leap to that price. But is everyone going to be able to claim the time, effort and resources were spent on there game? And is the explanation going to appeal to someone without a fucking PHD in “How many devs died for this” so they can still get the understanding?

I don’t understand the constant fealty to the desire to pick apart the exacts of a game development. Company makes game, company sells game, free market decides if its Mewgenics or Concorde or Halo or Mindseye.

If it lands at seventy bucks, which is the current standard, things stay relatively stable and we all go back to arguing about whether the physical edition comes with a map.

If it pushes to eighty, does that become the new normal?
Could but I wouldn’t want to be the dev trying to explain that. To knowledge and unknowable gamers alike.
And if it somehow hits a hundred dollars for the base version, congratulations, welcome to the darkest multi-universe choice.

The reality though, and this is the part that’s both more subtle and more predictable, is that the base game will probably hover right around the current standard. Seventy, maybe eighty at the outside. The real monetization, the real money extraction, comes from the layered editions. The premium. The ultimate. The collector’s. The 4 inch tall perfectly sculpted butt statue of the main female lead in perfectly placed jean shorts.
The online that they have already said will somehow go hand and hand with GTA 5.

What makes this entire spectacle exhausting at the same time is how painfully predictable the cycle has become. The company says something vague that sounds reassuring but commits to absolutely nothing. The internet interprets it as either a secret warning or a hidden confirmation depending on which subreddit you’re standing neck deep in their piss and spit in. And the click farms go to work repeating the same thing with some GPT spin so they can teleprompter their way to better gaming rooms.

Panic spreads. Memes are born. Suddenly you’ve got people budgeting for a video game like they’re financing a used Hyundai. Meanwhile the actual strategy is probably far less dramatic than any of this noise suggests. Keep the entry price somewhere in the neighborhood of accessible, then build a beautiful staircase of increasingly expensive options for the people who want early access, bonus content, or just the warm psychological comfort of knowing they own “the best version” like it’s some kind of status symbol instead of a damned receipt for a jpeg of a car that doesn’t exist.

And look, the real takeaway here isn’t whether GTA 6 lands at seventy or eighty or a hundred bucks. It’s that this game has the gravitational pull to redefine industry expectations simply by existing. Every single publisher with a pulse is watching though the moment the mystery goes away its not like they can instantly change. Every player with a wallet is speculating. Take-Two is carefully threading the needle between generating hype and triggering panic, which is a very fine needle indeed. And somewhere in the middle of all that shit, gamers are doing what gamers always do. Preparing for the worst, hoping for the best, and knowing deep down in the part of their brain that makes purchasing decisions at two in the morning that regardless of the price, they’re probably going to buy it anyway. Because if there’s one thing more inevitable than the slow creep of rising game prices, it’s the black hole gravity of a new Grand Theft Auto dropping.

And Take-Two knows it. They’ve always known it. That’s the part nobody wants to admit out loud and yet they are one of the only companies in gaming that can undercut or overprice with a staggering amount of freedom.

Samson: A Tyndalston Story lands on April 8th for Steam and Epic at $24.99, and no that shouldn’t be something that worries games in 2026. It’s developed and published by Liquid Swords, the studio Christofer Sundberg put together after leaving Avalanche and deciding that maybe making games should involve a little less spreadsheet worship and a little more actual game design.

This is a focused, dirty, hard-edged third-person brawler set in Tyndalston, a crumbling East Coast hellhole that looks like RoboCop’s Detroit got blackout drunk with Boston and a Seattle neighborhood and woke up in a ditch missing a shoe. It is not GTA. It doesn’t even want to be GTA. It is much more interested in making you feel like a desperate screwup trying to stay ahead of the next bad decision, in a city that maps forgot.

And that’s where Samson actually gets interesting. The whole game is built around bone crushing debt. Every day you wake up, the city basically leans over your shoulder, lights a cigarette in your cereal, and reminds you that you owe somebody money. Each day is split into morning, noon, and night, and every action costs points. Miss your quota and debt collectors show up to remind you that home invasions are apparently part of the local customer service package. Fail a mission, retrying costs more. Get arrested, get knocked out, screw up in some stupid little way, and your earnings can vanish. The result is a crime drama with a roguelite rhythm, one where freedom isn’t the power fantasy but by god getting crap done is The whole thing feels like the game is asking you, over and over, how much discomfort you are willing to call design.

Combat is a rough-and-tumble street fight setup with light attacks, heavy attacks, dodges, parries, and anything nearby that looks like it could break a jaw. Pipes, bottles, boards, bricks, wrenches. You can swing them, throw them, and generally use them to rearrange someone’s dental future. There is also an Adrenaline Rush mechanic that slows time and gives you a burst of damage, and it absolutely has that “oh thank Christ” energy when things go bad. Gunplay got and weirdly enough that actually helps the game. When someone pulls a gun, your reaction isn’t “cool, my turn.” It’s “oh shit, I need to leave.” Driving is also way better than expected, with your Magnum Opus muscle car feeling like it inherited some Mad Max DNA. Chases, escapes, ramming some idiot into a wall because diplomacy failed, it all works.

The city itself has an excellent historic feeling. Fast roads break into muddy side alleys and ugly industrial arteries, and the whole place has that believable, half-rotten layout where it looks like urban planning was replaced at some point by just hoping for the best and putting some bulldozers to work.

Performance was also better than I expected on a 4090, with medium to high settings, native res, DLSS, FSR, and frame gen support all there, though busier areas do show some pop-in.

But here’s where the tires start coming off the stolen car. The soft lock-on is messy, the heavy attack wind-up takes so long it feels like Samson is checking with a union rep before he throws a punch, and his movement has this weird jerky analog-stick snap to it that never feels natural. He doesn’t move like a guy easing into a sprint. He moves like a kid trying to run after his mom yelled “wait right there” from the parking lot and he can’t sit still. This makes the games platforming and climbing are rough too, with jumps that look like they were animated by a completely different team on a completely different day. AI is also all over the place. Some enemies are blind enough to miss a house fire in their own kitchen, while others hear you from three rooms over like they are sonar-equipped psychic butchers with unresolved anger issues.

Still, not everything on the rough side is a true mind killer. The voice acting is better than expected, some of the phone-call storytelling lands well, and the music is straight-up excellent. It gets that grimy crime-noir tone right in a way a lot of much bigger games completely miss. So what you end up with is a game that is very obviously carrying limitations. Some of them feel born from a team that got cut in half and still had to ship. Others feel intentional, like the developers wanted tension and friction to be part of the design itself. Whether that hits for you or just feels rough depends entirely on what you are willing to forgive. But I’ll say this: Samson at least has a point of view, and in a genre full of games that confuse size with identity, that actually matters.

Its just not ready to be rolled out yet

Opening

Sudo51 is a man with no bounds, a videogame creater that, have the time doesn’t seem to be co-developing but collaborating with some entity in the multiverse and just translating fever dreams into games.

So when Romeo is a Dead Man was shown it wasn’t too surprising he was the man in charge...or in this case maybe communing to create it.

A 3rd person action game in an enclosed episodic nature lets see how it did.

Its best to think of games from grasshopper in the same way that the lead developer said in a recent interview “There are already enough “orthodox” games out there to begin with, and I don’t think it’s our place to compete with them!”

Let me tell you something about Romeo Is a Dead Man - this game is like they took a f*cking blender and threw in Dark Souls, Devil May Cry, some old arcade games, a dash of Returnal, and then just hit puree while laughing maniacally. It’s a fever dream of a game that somehow manages to be both completely batsh*t insane and actually kinda brilliant at the same time. If you go in expecting anything even remotely resembling a coherent, traditional video game experience, you’re gonna be either disappointed or absolutely delighted depending on how much you love Suda51’s special brand of creative anarchy. This is the kind of game that makes you question whether the developers are smoking something or just geniuses who understand that sometimes you need to throw nine different art styles at a wall and see what sticks.

https://www.patreon.com/c/AngryCentaurGaming

Story

So Romeo is going out to find Juliet, right? Except this time Juliet isn’t just one person - that would be too normal. Instead, Juliet is a series of multiple copies across different dimensions, each one progressively more goddamn insane than the last. It’s like the developers looked at the original Romeo and Juliet story and said “You know what?” Ya we don’t know either lets just run with it.

The narrative embraces this chaos completely, making each encounter with a new Juliet boss fight both thematically connected to your relationship and completely fucking bonkers in execution. You know you’re in for a wild ride when a boss pulls their own head off and turns into a 200 foot tall massively obese headless Goliath with a bellybutton the size of the Carlsbad Canyon. I shit you not, that’s actually a thing that happens in this game.

The story starts with space-time itself being shattered by some incident, and Romeo finds himself on the brink of death but gets revived by some super technology created by his scientist grandfather. He becomes an FBI Space-Time special agent called Dead Man and hunts space-time fugitives while trying to find his missing girlfriend Juliet. What’s interesting is how the game plays with the traditional spiritual feeling of games like Dark Souls - instead of decay and disease and Cthulhu-like Elder Gods spirituality, Romeo Is a Dead Man goes the complete opposite route and embraces arcade-style spiritual entities as digital RGB graphs or spectrum analyzers on equalizers. It gives this very distinct almost RPG light kind of feel that’s unlike a lot of other games.

Gameplay

The gameplay starts out normal enough - you’ve got your A and B buttons on controller or mouse keys on PC for weak and heavy attacks, which builds up a blood gauge to pull off a super move when its full up. Then there are enemies with weak spots that make you pull out your gun and do some serious van damage before you go back to beating them to death with whatever weapon you’ve got equipped. The game actually has two distinct types of areas - there are open areas where you’re running around exploring, and then there are spots where the game basically locks you into a small arena Devil May Cry style and forces you to fight waves of enemies until you clear them out. These arena encounters are where the game really starts to show its colors, with different types of enemies spawning other enemies and creating these chaotic cluster of combat that are both frustrating and somehow satisfying.

Now, let’s talk about the combat’s good and bad points. The melee combat actually feels ok for the most part - it’s fast enough, and the blood gauge mechanic adds some nice depth especially in boss fights where weak-points and spacing can be important. But then there’s the shooting, which is definitely a weak point. It just doesn’t feel as good as the close combat, and hitting those weak spots is more finicky than it probably should be. The gun is basically a laser gun type thing, but there’s just not enough feedback to make it feel satisfying. At point-blank range it works fine, but without a lock-on system, you’ll miss shots you really shouldn’t be missing. Also the weapons don’t always have the expected result. You get a missile launcher kind of weapon but until its damage is really upgraded it feels like a shotgun. Splash damage is almost 0 and hitting enemies with it doesn’t do much. Also there is no reload button. So for guns you fire till your out then hit the same button to initiate a reload process.

Weapons are unlocked then upgraded with material you get while fighting and exploring each with 4 traits. Overall it falls into the expected in those areas. Though there is a weird mini-game you play inside your spaceship that’s like a gas guzzling version of pacman where you move through a level collecting power-ups that are then applied to the character.

Performance and Art

So one thing you can always expect from Grasshopper is the unexpected. And without a double romeo is a dead man might be the one that has the most unexpected in it.

The game has no less than nine fucking different art styles. NINE. I’m not kidding - from comic books to digital realms to paintings to old VHS tapes, this game throws everything at the wall and somehow most of it sticks. Normally when a game jumps between wildly different visual styles like going from Returnal/Tron aesthetics to 8-bit pixel graphics, it would fall completely apart. But somehow, Romeo Is a Dead Man manages to hold it together.
It doesn’t have the cohesive look of something like Guardians of the Galaxy, which went for a specific 80s/70s aesthetic. No, this game just embraces the chaos. The HUD and menus have this very pastel look to it that’s basic but at the same time features geometric patterns that actually make it easier to parse. When you go into your item menu or status page, it can look confusing at first - almost like an old PBS opening title scrawl - but as you continue looking at it, you realize there’s actually some artistic design that makes sense after a while. Ok maybe you just get accustomed to it versus it all making sense but whatever

What’s really interesting is that Suda51’s approach to the art was basically to let each artist do their best work. He’d match up staff members to scenes that suited their particular style - so the guy good at Western-style comic book art gets to draw certain scenes, while someone else good at a different style gets other scenes. It’s a collaborative approach that results in this wild mishmash of visual styles that somehow manages to work together rather than feeling like a complete mess. The game doesn’t have the cohesiveness of something more deliberately styled, but that’s kind of the point - it’s supposed to be this chaotic, unpredictable visual experience.

Performance isn’t really something you will have to worry about in the game unless you have something a couple generations old. it does have a ton of settings but the games overall style, its smaller levels and basic environments don’t require a great deal from your pc.

Audio

Voice-wise, the game is pretty solid, but you need to be aware that there’s a great deal of tongue-in-cheek humor and inside jokes scattered throughout. There are references to Romeo and Juliet itself, video games, and all sorts of pulp fiction kind of inside jokes. There were times where it was difficult to tell if the translation was slightly off or if it was all done purposefully for comedic effect.

But honestly, by the time I was done with the game, I was leaning toward the idea that it was all intentional, and it just ended up adding to the atmosphere of this very warped game that pretends you’re a normal character jumping into other dimensions when really his original dimension is already insane. The audio design complements the visual chaos perfectly, creating this surreal experience where you never quite know what you’re going to hear next.

The real question is did they elevate the actual game. I would say middling. I liked the idea but feel that the wonkiness of prior games from the developer did a better job

Also while I loved the last last last generation kind of presentation at times sitting there reading a ton of text goes from nostalgic to ancient feeling really fast. Especially as the same jokes don’t land in text the way they may voiced.

Musically i would also say that the game is a bit all over the place interjecting odd jingles in almost every menu or popup or loading screen, then popping out to excellent licensed and vocal tracks at other times then leaping into older style bitty music at other times.

Funfactor

Here’s where things get really interesting. Romeo Is a Dead Man throws so much shit at you that it’s almost overwhelming. I’m talking bullet hell moments, Dead Rising-style zombie group fighting, 2D sections, 16-bit graphics, comic book moments, and that’s just in the first couple of levels. Then you’ve got Dark Souls-style save points where if you take certain actions, enemies re-spawn, but then at other times they seem to re-spawn randomly in the level itself - which turns out to be because many of them are just hiding, pretending to be dead or otherwise playing possum.

You know how most long shows have that season that makes everyone go “did these guys just do all the payote?” Sadly Romeo is a dead man does have just that. And its sadly the 2nd level for me, a boring affair that’s like the mall from dead rising if it was 2 stories a couple stores and was missing the moments you could dress up like a teenage girl and slash enemies with foam swords.

The bosses are a perfect example of what makes this game great and frustrating at the same time. They’re absolutely crazy and visually weird, but they usually break down to the same basic pattern: find the weak spots, learn the enemy’s attack timings, and wait for the fairly large openings in their patterns. Then there are times like an arena section where your facing off against slow moving almost impossible to die from monsters that doesn’t do much.

The spectacle is more enjoyable than the actual combat most of the time, but at times it feels like that’s just how the game works - like the developers knew they couldn’t make the deep, complex combat work so they focused on making the bosses look fucking awesome instead. And honestly? I’m okay with that.

This is a game that knows exactly what it is - a chaotic, unpredictable mess that somehow manages to be more fun than it has any right to be. It’s not perfect by any means, and the shooting mechanics definitely need work, and the slow button holding gets annoying as hell, but there’s something about this game’s sheer audacity that just works. It’s like the developers said “fuck it” and threw in every crazy idea they had, and somehow it all comes together into something that’s actually pretty damn fun. You get to play through nine different art styles, fight bosses that turn into 200-foot headless Goliaths, and upgrade your weapons while playing weird spaceship minigames.

It’s the kind of game that makes you appreciate creative chaos and reminds you why gaming can be so damn interesting when developers aren’t afraid to go completely off the rails.

But is it for you

Rating

IF you are a huge fan of the developer this might be worth getting. Otherwise it is a rougher game than normal from them and that’s saying something and waiting is best.

like this kind of stuff consider joining the limited discord for acg https://www.patreon.com/c/AngryCentaurGaming

Nioh 3 Is the Kind of Problem Your Thumbs Have Been Waiting For!

Let’s be real: if karma exists, Team Ninja built the Nioh series specifically to punish you for liking it. For nearly a decade, they’ve stubbornly refined a hyper-complex, brutally demanding action game while the rest of the industry chased Souls-like buzzwords on TikTok. Changing Nioh now would be like putting on a raincoat when you’re already soaked.

But with Nioh 3, the formula evolves. The core remains punishing combat, loot obsession, lethal precision but the framework shifts. About an hour in, I sat back and thought: Okay, this feels different. But is different better? Here’s the breakdown.

Release & Structure: No More Wait, No Staggered Ports

Nioh 3 launches February 6, 2026, on PlayStation 5 and PC (Steam)day-and-date, no waiting nine months for a PC port that “needs more polish.” For those burned by Team Ninja’s previous PC launches I get the worry.

What is Nioh 3

The biggest structural change is the Open Field system. Gone are the mission-select menu and isolated, corridor-like levels. Instead, you explore large hub areas connected by “murder zones,” with shrines acting as fast-travel way-points. The world feels threaded, not fragmented. You scout threats before engaging, and exploration isn’t just a cut-scene between combat arenas it’s part of the combat loop: explore, find trouble, clean it up, get stronger. Corpse runs aren’t marathons; they’re moments to analyze your mistakes. I and spent tons of times cursing myself for a miss or blaming my controller for a bumper button not working instantly but I knew, deep down inside that even if that were true, I put myself in that god damned spot.
The connectivity also means side quests and mini-missions appear organically as you traverse each region.

The story framing supports this. You play a customizable protagonist (yes, you can still make the world’s most absurdly customized samurai) in 1622 Edo, caught in a supernatural family feud. Your brother storms the castle with a spirit army, triggering a yokai apocalypse. A guardian spirit whisks you through time periods from Edo bureaucracy to battlefields—letting the game swap eras as the plot advances. It’s history through a mythological demolition derby, and the narrative is more coherent than past entries, though it still relishes in spectacle over subtlety.
Its also a story that you may work through quickly or find yourself trying to remember what the hell was going on 11 hours ago when the last cutscene played.
Listen a lot of people are going to handwave the story away. I get it. Its a bit like old kung Fu theater on USA channel on Sunday mornings. And besides a spirit that basically 88 miles per hours you on its furry delorian back isn’t that easy to understand anyway.

Combat and That Big Class Switch

Combat: Samurai, Ninja, and the One-Button Switch

If you thought Nioh was just “hard,” you missed the point. It’s busy systems on systems and Nioh 3 gives those systems room to breathe. The headline addition is dual combat styles: Samurai (the familiar stance-based, Ki Pulse-driven gameplay) and Ninja (fast, evasive, stealth-focused with a “Mist” clone/dodge mechanic). You can swap between them instantly in combat, even mid-enemy animation, with a single button press. Mist is just a blast. Nothing more enjoyable than basically spirit farting a ghost in the spot you just where and watching an enemy traipse through it confused and swinging.

- Samurai is your classic triangle of risk/reward: low-mid-high stances, Ki recovery, and a new Deflect that feels less like a parry gamble and more like a tactical shrug. Time it right, you gain breathing room; mess up, you’re exposed. Skills let you Ki Pulse by dodging, or modify deflect movement. Ki pulse while dodging is a massive boon too. One of the better of the more noticeable skills.

- Ninja ditches Ki Pulse for Mist a decoy that can transfer enemy Ki to you if upgraded. It’s about mobility, aerial play, and stealth lethality (headshots/backstabs grant bonus XP and loot). But it can “go loud” with poison, fog, and speed.

Landing a timed counter on a burst attack can auto-switch you to the other style, creating fluid, improvisational combat. You stop thinking in stances and start thinking in tempos a little bit of musical enemy attack patterns, when to tank as Samurai, when to evade and re-position as Ninja. That’s when the game opens up. And that’s also when it kills you for getting cocky. The depth is ridiculous, and the UI helps: stat blocks split clearly between base character, Samurai, and Ninja proficiency, with color-coded weapon groupings. It’s still a spreadsheet, but now it’s a spreadsheet that points at itself and yells, “This is what you should be doing!”

Progression

Progression: Soul Cores, Guardian Spirits, and the Crucible

You’re still drowning in loot. Soul Cores return rip them from fallen enemies, cleanse them, slot them for attribute bonuses and special effects (life drain, gold find, etc.). Nioh 3 adds Yin/Yang slots the same core can offer different abilities based on placement, turning collection into a strategic puzzle.

Guardian Spirits are back, swapping to change baseline perks (attack/defense boosts, elemental resists). Destroying spirit realm spikes in the open fields unlocks new spirit abilities.

The Alters menu is your customization hub: adjust skills, offerings, blessings from Jizo/Kodama shrines, and prepare gear for deconstruction to earn rare items. But the big new loop is the Crucible dungeon-like challenges with Life Corrosion damage that permanently lowers your max HP until purified. Beat a Crucible, and you earn a Crucible Weapon with wicked special attacks. The trade-off? Corruption leaks into the normal world while you wield it. It’s a brilliant risk/reward loop: power for sickness, like carrying plutonium to bash someone with.

Breaches in the overworld escalate this areas gain environmental hazards (poison pools, anti-ki zones, lava), turning exploration into a live-fire exercise. You’re not just fighting enemies; you’re fighting the terrain.

Multiplayer: Still Not “Easy,” But More Accessible

If you need someone to kill that Karen who resides in her basement like crucible you can always call in a pal.
Summon help or be help co-op returns, and the open-field structure makes it feel more like a shared adventure than a sterile mission line. You can form three-player expeditions, though PS5 and PC do not share cross-play at launch (separate pools keep timing/cheating concerns in check, but it splits friend groups).

Joining isn’t as simple as a “join lobby” button, but it’s closer than before. The game’s inherent difficulty means one bad dodge can wipe the party, but that’s part of the charm. You’re all one mistimed roll from a highlight reel titled “Oops.”

Graphics, Performance, and the Little Annoyances

Visually, Nioh 3 is a mix of “next-gen target” and “Nioh 2.5.” The art team’s talent for blending historical reference with demonic flair shines Heian silks, Edo paperwork, Sengoku iron all clash under one sky. But texture detail dips in spots, especially on some creature models and cutscenes, reminding you this lineage still carries last-gen DNA. A weird “gossamer” effect on some spiritual enemies looks like a shader overrun. On PC, the settings menu is a buffet: shadows, ambient occlusion, wind sway, global illumination, upscaling, frame generation. There is a metric shitton of options here and many of them with 3-4 levels of choice.

Performance: Specific

- PS5: Quality (30fps) and Performance (target 60fps) modes. Frame pacing is janky; Performance dips often and resolution looks soft. Quality mode feels more stable but locked to 30fps.

- PC (3080, 1440p): Mostly above 60fps with maxed settings. Random pop-in occurs when sprinting, but upscaling helps. Some rocky terrain textures are bland.

But lets just get this out of the way. The Lip-sync is atrocious mouths move like malfunctioning puppets because they only animated for the japanese voices. Thats fine but also be aware the English VO is overly theatrical; Japanese audio with subtitles is more coherent. The soundtrack swings between atmospheric dread and “big historical epic” drama, occasionally mismatching the world’s filthy desperation. Sound design, however, is stellar: hits have weight, deflects pop, yokai abilities feel distinct, and audio cues often save you in chaotic fights. The sound system saved my life a couple times when my eyes were to drawn to some flashy thing and I missed an enemy getting ready to pounce behind me.

The Flaws: Repetition, Readability, and Legacy Weight

1. Pacing & Repetition: The open-field structure makes repetition more visible. After 25–30 hours, you may feel stuck in a loop castle to castle, mission beat to mission beat where older, menu-contained structure disguised the grind. The story is more directed, but it leans on lore dumps less, so when momentum strains, you feel it.

2. Boss Quality: Some are fantastic, memorable duels. A few though feel like rope-a-dope grinds or tutorial leftovers. A mid-game trio is shockingly easy; one can be cheesed by simply walking in circles and it was almost confusing to the point of it feeling bugged.

3. Visual Noise: In chaotic fights especially Crucibles with overlapping spells, particle effects, and flying enemies the screen becomes hard to read. The camera can also go into friggen fits in tight boss arenas, sometimes clipping into scenery. This happens in boss spots more than the open world.

4. Genre Fatigue: You can’t play this in 2026 without noticing the Souls-like formula’s cracks: odd collision, tracking quirks, recycled animations. Nioh 3 pushes innovation through systems and not spectacle, but the genre’s age shows at times. Enemies spinning in place to hit you regardless or really really generous hitboxes for things like the enemies unblockable throws.

Verdict: A Brilliantly Sometimes Irritating Masterclass

Nioh 3 isn’t perfect. It repeats itself. It overwhelms you with systems that occasionally clash. It asks you to love it by punching you in the face until you “get it.” But that’s the point. The combat is a drug deep, expressive, and merciless. The dual-style system adds freedom without sacrificing identity. The Crucible and Breach loops turn risk into a tangible, corrupting reward. I love the idea of using crucible weapons in the real world, exchanging amazing abilities for corruption of life. The open-field structure gives space to breathe between choke-points.

You will die. You will tweak a gear set. You will swap a Soul Core from Yin to Yang for a 5% damage boost and then realize “Nope” that’s not it.
You will finally beat that boss because you learned its tempo.. That loop learning through trauma, mastery through tinkering is why Nioh exists. Nioh 3 expands it mostly, and still refuses to hold your hand.

It’s a game for the stubborn. For the player who loves a spreadsheet that kills them. For the one who finds joy in a perfectly timed deflect-switch-counter. After twelve years, Team Ninja hasn’t softened. They’ve just given you more ways to suffer beautifully.

Bottom line: Nioh 3 is the same punishing, loot-crazed samurai-ninja experiment you love, now with a smarter world and a one-button style swap. It’s still built to punish you for liking it.

And because of what it offers its very hard to not leap into that relationship knowing its abusive.

Lets Talk About Games: Oleksa Lozowchuk https://www.interleavecreative.com/games Step inside the creative mind of Oleksa Lozowchuk, a composer shaping the emotional worlds of video games through music. In this episode of The Secrets of Gaming, Oleksa shares his journey into game composition, revealing how soundtracks are crafted to enhance gameplay, tell stories, and immerse players in unforgettable experiences.

Oleksa and his company Interleave has worked on over 50+ games with Oleksa himself working on Outer Worlds 2, the Horizon Series with Sony, all the way to Dead Rising and 14 plus titles with that company.

Oleksa can break down everything in a score, why the key is chosen, how to decide what instrument to use and when, but he also is a fantastic person when it comes to mentoring others, working in groups as well as alone. I love the guy and was happy to have him back as the first guest on the Talking the Talk Series.

Ubisoft just dropped some new job listings for deadbeat 3d adventure dad known as Beyond Good and Evil 2. Wasn’t on my list of stuff to cover today but waking up and reading it and thinking…god damn its been ages.

The sequel was supposed to come out by now, build on the original friggen space opera classic that we all know and love though lets be honest, the original isn’t as good as we remember and its also been stuck in development hell since literally 2008. That’s right, seventeen fucking years. You could have been born, gone through elementary school, hit puberty, and graduated college in the time this game has been “in development.” Yet here we are, with Ubisoft posting openings for positions like Lead Quest Designer and Technical Sound Designer on their careers page, confirming that yes, they’re still working on this god damned white whale of a game.

Beyond Good & Evil 2 is still being built using Ubisoft’s proprietary Voyager engine, the same one they showed off way back in 2017 when they actually had the balls to stand on stage and pretend this thing was coming soon. The game’s described as an “action-adventure open world game set in a captivating space opera universe” where you can supposedly “seamlessly move from dense open-world cities into space.” Yeah, that seamless planetary travel promise from 2017? Still apparently the goal, even if we’re all pretty sure it’s been vaporware for the better part of a decade.

This game’s development history reads like a fucking Greek tragedy. Michel Ancel, the original director who had this wild vision for a space pirate adventure, bailed out of Ubisoft in 2020 after some pretty serious allegations about toxic leadership and development restarts. Then Emile Morel, the creative director who took over, suddenly died in 2023 at the tragically young age of 40. And now we’ve got Fawzi Mesmar at the helm, trying to steer this sinking ship while dealing with the fact that, according to some reports, 70% of the original team that started building the engine back in 2017 has already jumped ship, 30% have died of old age, and 20% can’t do math. Just kidding on that last bit.
But even crazier you could be reading this easily and thinking to yourself, that original game came out 2 or 3 years before I was born.

The Ubisoft Montpellier studio is apparently pouring most of its resources into this thing, around 70% of their staff is currently working on BG&E2, according to some industry insiders. That’s insane when you consider that while they’ve been spinning their wheels on this, other studios have released entire franchises. Think about it: since Beyond Good & Evil 2 was re-announced in 2017, God of War has had two games, The Last of Us got a sequel, a remake, AND a fucking TV show, and Pokémon has dropped like six titles. Meanwhile, we’re still getting Ubisoft’s annual “yes, it’s still happening” press releases.

But here’s where it gets interesting despite all the drama, the turnover, and the fact that this game has been in some form of development for longer than the iPhone has existed, Ubisoft can’t just cancel it. According to those same industry sources, this thing is essentially a vanity project from when Ubisoft was trying to show corporate muscle during some takeover drama. Cancelling it now would be admitting defeat, and with hundreds of developers currently assigned to it, where the hell would they even put all those people? But that’s like still building a castle because you had an invader from 11 years ago but now your best friends.

Here is the thing.

So yeah, Beyond Good & Evil 2 is still happening. The job listings prove it. The Voyager engine is still being used. The space pirate vision is apparently still intact. But when will we actually see it? Your guess is as good as mine. Could be next year, could be 2030, could be when we’re all flying around in hovercars and paying for digital groceries.

I said that in 2023 during a podcast. And I got a ton of shit for it. But I stand by it. Its not the cause of one person, or even a group. Its a combination of factors that will be ignored because commercially they are popular. And maybe that’s how it should be?

Soon, December 2025, Geoff Keighley will squeeze into his tuxedo one more time to pretend The Game Awards actually means something while counting sponsorship money.

200k+ for a 30 second spot. Replacing E3 in almost every single way including high cost.
The voting system? Oh it’s a beautiful clusterfuck 90% from “expert jurors” who couldn’t distinguish a PlayStation from mini pc, 10% from actual players who somehow still believe their votes matter.

These so-called experts include folks from a ton of media outlets that are normally writing celebrity gossip for most of the year. No not just their gamer spots vote.

Requirements to finish the games that are voted on? Nope. We know that when 2024’s awards came out and some “voters” mentioned on podcasts later that they hadn’t played any of the games in some of the entire genre they voted on. Check cause you can find it.

AI-Raiders

Then there is the oddity around Arc Raiders.
The AI controversy with Arc Raiders perfectly captures the hypocrisy—86 on Metacritic but only nominated for Best Multiplayer while getting completely snubbed in Best Audio despite reportedly exceptional sound design.
While some have stated “they are trying to stay away from controversy” No its there in the awards its nominated. You don’t hide by literally showing a game in one of the main categories.

What you do is display that those voting have no real clue about audio.

Hate AI or not, the stance is clear here. No stance just lack of knowledge.

Future Class - No Class

Future Class? Don’t even get me started. That mentorship program turned out to be a fucking disaster where participants felt like props, got shoved to Starbucks while Keighley partied with influencers, promised meetings with developers and producers to help out the future class turned out to be 30 minute Zoom calls.
The program vanished in 2024 and The Game Awards digitally erased all evidence it ever existed like some authoritarian douchebags trying to rewrite history.

The whole thing reeks of institutional mediocrity wrapped in a fancy tuxedo that shoved the prior presenter off the stage.
Listen not many loved E3, and I appreciate an awards show, and I love that companies are being celebrated. But they nominated a game for New Indie developer game this year from someone who had already released a game. The stunning lack of attention is depressing. It took the developer dropping out to even call attention to it.

If it sounds like I am pissed a bit, ya I am. This is just a couple of the issues that have happened. There are more. From the “Indie" - small team” announcement last year that resulted in the developer actually apologizing FOR the awards by reminding them they had a ton of devs working on the game and weren’t really independent to the biggest offender.

The Game Awards has always chased the Oscars, and yet we are the biggest industry in the world in entertainment. The continued desire to be that has completely screwed up the situation.

In the past couple years I have experienced both remakes and remasters and a weird monster mix of both. But without proper data never really knew but always assumed that Remakes, if offered, would be the most chosen type of title between the two.
We have The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, Call of Duties, Halos. There is a reason and now we have a bit of data at least.

So here’s the thing: remakes make sense. They just do. Remasters are reheating leftover pizza — technically edible, maybe even enjoyable, but it’s still the same old slice. A remake, though? That’s a whole new damn pizza with better crust, updated toppings, and maybe some sweet ass digital pineapple if you’re feeling dangerous.

So according to a study by Ampere Analysis, gamers are now spending over twice as much on remakes than on remasters. Of course at least 50 percent of those are the Last of Us 2. All joking aside the study looked at 42 re-released games between January 2024 and September 2025 — 15 remakes and 27 remasters — which together roped in 72 million players and raked in a monstrous $1.4 billion in consumer spending. And the average remake? It pulled 2.2 times more cash than your typical remaster. That’s counting everything from base game sales to DLCs to microtransactions. (Because of course they found a way to monetize your nostalgia — it’s 2025, baby.) Its one of the few forms where customizable look like shit on purpose.

Spending Gap Leaped

The study’s definition helps explain the spending gap, a bit though. A remaster is essentially a glow-up. You’re still running on the same old bones — same engine, same animations, just prettier lighting and textures. A remake, on the other hand, is the full reconstructive surgery package: new engine, new voice acting, fresh animations, sometimes even different story beats. It’s not nostalgia preservation — it’s nostalgia reincarnation. At least if done well.

Remakes hit that sweet spot between emotional memory, modern standards, and mechanical might from whatever console or PC you are throwing at the older game. They work on two audiences at once: the grizzled veterans who remember playing it in their parents’ basement, and the new players who finally get to see what the hype was about without needing to pull out an RGB hookup converter.. That double-dip appeal is marketing gold — which explains why Resident Evil 4, Final Fantasy VII, and The Last of Us Part I all hit like nostalgia nukes.

But let’s not pretend this is easy money in comparison to remasters. Remakes cost a shit-ton more more to make — bigger teams, longer dev cycles, way more room to screw up. You’re not just porting textures; you’re basically rebuilding a memory. And if you mess up? Oh, fans will come for you. Fail to balance nostalgia with modern polish, and you’ve got yourself a Reddit-thread apocalypse. Ask anyone who remembers Silent Hill HD Collection.

BUT…

But no I haven’t forgotten friggen elephent in the room here. Yes remaster of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion somehow made $180 million. That’s nuts. That’s blockbuster numbers in any year across any field. So sure, remakes are winning the revenue race, but a good remaster isn’t dead yet. It’s just wheezing at the finish line. Though I would still argue that the Oblivion remaster is more of a remake especially with the duel engine methodology that they pancaked together.

If all we wanted was higher resolution, we’d just upgrade our GPUs and call it a day. Players want something that respects the original and acknowledges that, hey, we’ve moved on from tank controls and muddy textures. Ya I am talking to your RE.

The economics even check out with how modern players behave. Research from MIDiA shows gamers buy fewer full-priced titles now but spend way more time (and cash) in the ones that matter. That’s remake territory: high polish, emotional payoff, replayability. They’re not just nostalgia bait — they’re substantial.

But let’s be real for a second — the numbers look neat, but they’re a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. Not every game gets a remake or a remaster, and it’s not like there’s a clean “one-to-one” match-up every year. It’s apples to refurbished oranges sometimes, I mean we get maybe one Resident Evil 4-style remake for every dozen texture-upscale remasters that sneak onto Steam with a $29.99 price tag and a “4K support” sticker slapped somewhere int he damned steam description. So yeah, remakes are making more money — partly because they’re actually there to make it.
And sometimes we get the Batman Trilogy which somehow made the games almost look worse than the originals.

So yeah, remasters will always exist — they’re cheap, fast, and safe — but the real magic (and money) is in remakes. They’re not just about re-living the past; they’re about reinterpreting it for an audience that’s seen too many damn remasters already.

And honestly? If a remake gives me better controls, smarter AI, and a camera that doesn’t freak out every time I back into a wall, then yeah — take my money.
But I am still going to argue that their purchase prices can feel off.

How do you feel about it?

Kiss the dog, and hi five the wive, or maybe it was the opposite. I know my wife left ready to have a great day, my dog was curled at my feet and. I checked my email. Oh incoming mail. Lets sit down and see what this...oh ...

“Hello,

This is redacted from Redacted, a gaming marketing agency. I found you on YouTube and realized you were a good fit for our new campaign!

We are helping our client, Blank Ass Games, explore collaboration opportunities with you. Right now we are preparing a campaign for their upcoming open-world MMO RPG for PC and console. This is a AAA-quality title featuring a vast, immersive world and rich gameplay content.

We would be very interested in collaborating with you on a dedicated video or a livestream. If you are interested, kindly direct reply with your rate to this email”

What a god damned masterclass in corporate idiocy. I thought I’d seen peak nonsense before—PR fluff, fake “collab” offers, those “we think you’d be a great fit for our new crypto-slash-gaming venture” emails—but this one? This one hit different. It was the kind of soul-sucking bullshit that makes you want to launch your inbox into the sun.

Why? Well some random “agent” hits me up, pretending we’ve got this deep, synergistic bond because they “saw my channel on YouTube.”

Translation: they scraped my name off a spreadsheet and fired off the same template to fifty other people before breakfast.

Why it hits different.

Its not that the email exists I get those, its that it faked knowing the channel and spent the clients money needlessly. They didn’t even understand the channel which doesn’t even do that. So what did they see on the channel?

Why would I fit?

The kicker? They’re representing a multi-billion-dollar company—the kind of outfit that spends more on making in-game horse armor than I do on rent and somehow their point of contact is this absolute disaster of a human being who wouldn’t know professionalism if it bit him in the ass.

If I were the client, I’d be furious. Like, lawsuit-level mad. You hire someone to represent your brand, most likely due to their past possible success. And instead you get a gapemouthed rodeo clown firing “Hey bro, wanna do a collab?” emails like he’s cold-pitching his SoundCloud. I would’ve fired that person so fast they would have lost a months salery due to time travel.

And look, I get the spiel: “Get your bag.” “Don’t hate the player.” “It’s just business.” Nah, man. If “getting your bag” means enabling liars with corporate email signatures, I’ll pass. Because every time one of these hollow brained suits hits send, another ounce of credibility gets yeeted into the void from Youtubers.

And yeah, I get it—people gotta make money. But at some point, you’ve gotta stop defending incompetence just because the check posted to your bank account. You’ve gotta stop pretending these people know what the hell they’re doing. Because they don’t.

So yeah. Maybe the next time you see a YouTuber at an event or hyping up some shiny new “brand partnership,” ask yourself how they got there. Spoiler: they didn’t buy their own ticket. They didn’t buy their own copy of the game. They sure as hell didn’t read the fine print. So how the hell can they represent anyone normal.

Because behind every “exclusive preview” or “sponsored segment,” there’s some PR gremlin in a too-tight polo shirt blasting out lies from a WeWork. And that, my friends, is the real horror story of modern gaming.

Because have you ever thought about the fact that if youtubers trully “loved this blankity blank otherwise I wouldn’t shill for it” they would be fucking swimming in items. They would have 40 pairs of headsets, they would have 200 tablets, and go to online therapy 100 times a week.
So if they are straight lying about that...then what else is going on.

It’s 3 a.m. I’ve been up for 42 hours across many days, cracking away, talking to this game back and forth — plotting out difficulty curves, testing responsiveness of the AI, checking out weapon attacks, collision boxes, plotting out 3D audio and its timing and delays.

That’s because I’ve been doing a review, and it’s 3 a.m., and that review goes up in 24 hours.

I sit back happy with myself, look at my data, and realize I am happy and upload it.
The thumbnail takes moments.

Thumbnails and Routine and Worry

Thumbnails are pretty easy. One of the things about thumbnails, at least that I’ve found, is once you’ve become known for a very specific type of thumbnail, changing them can ultimately result in you losing more traffic than gaining — no matter how clickbaity. You see a lot of ‘experts’ and massive users who will tell you different but let me leave you with this.

• If a click baity, or pro-designed thumbnail was all it took no one would need them, it would be the baselines.

Since I don’t like clickbait in the first place, the couple of attempts I’ve made to change things around have sometimes resulted in a higher view count, but nothing that’s ever made me feel like I absolutely have to do it. So I this night I just throw my typical thumbnail together and will let God(erm) Youtube do the work.

Then I decide — I’m going to go online and just verify and see if the developers have popped off any little bits of data. Maybe a deal here or there, maybe a drop in price or something else.

The Terror of the Desperate Search for Reasons

That terror is because I see somebody has accidentally released their review early. But then, as I scroll down, I realize it’s not just one person. It’s two, three, four, five... I scroll farther — six, seven, eight, nine, ten. I scroll even farther, get to twenty, and realize something is drastically wrong..

I leap back into all my embargo data. Check the embargo data. Check the date. Check the time. Check the date. Check the time. Check the date again. Everything indicates those reviews shouldn’t be out.

1. All reviews of any kind will be held until REDACTED

So I go and check — and I find other people are talking about this. Various other people are confused, some post their reviews right away thinking that they missed an update, others wait around asking on various discords, others email their contacts.

Yes — we’ve run into the dreaded dual embargo date, a situation that, while rarely talked about and usually for all the wrong reasons, is one of the most diabolical channel-eaters that exists on YouTube.

What Is a Dual Embargo?

Well, let me explain.
A dual embargo, for same -type content, is one of the most insidious forms of fuckery that exists currently on YouTube or in the journalistic world.

That means a Review is embargoed for 2 different dates but the information makes it appear as if its normal.

One review at 10:00 AM PST on the 1st, another at 12pm PST on the 2nd, both for reviews, with the same data and requirements many times.
In fact, to get the game, you usually have to sign the embargo. Those embargoes are identical in all ways. Even if they weren’t, nearly 100% of embargoes now have restrictions like:

• Don’t show after this level.

• Don’t show after this character’s introduced.

• Don’t show if this character’s died.

• The atypical typical.

The Myth of the “Different” Embargo

You may think to yourself, “Aha, I understand why — it’s because of the embargo itself. One group doesn’t sign it.”

Incorrect

There’s absolutely no difference in a dual embargo for the majority of creators outside of the time itself — even if one says you can show “this many levels” and the other says “that many.”

How Dual Embargoes Wreck Channels

Here’s why the dual embargo shatters a channel.

Depending on your YouTube channel type, your videos are aligned to a specific type, viewer, channel, and video. Whether you’re a streamer, a reviewer, or you do previews, news, or a mixture of both, over a small amount of time YouTube’s algorithm figures out the correct time to inform your watchers of your video. It doesn’t do it right away — that changed in 2021. It doesn’t inform everyone, it doesn’t inform them right away, and it takes a hour or so for the algo to even add it to returns sometimes.

If you’re a reviewer, it knows to give your videos to particular watchers at those particular times and then filter out remaining viewers Additionally, you have your searchers and people going online to find information, or to show you on the “related” style tabs

Meaning, regardless of coverage type, the arbitrarily split groups and say: “this group can go at this time, and this group can go at that time”, means that you have 1 side of a 3 discovery pillar of incoming views removed.

When a dual embargo comes up, one group not only gets an earlier release time — they get the views. Most viewers, especially for reviews, only watch a couple. If there’s a majority-rule thought process formed by the first batch of reviews, there’s a very low chance the second batch will get anywhere near the same attention. This lack of attention tells the algo its not worth watching, less-people less algo-weight, less people, less…well you get it.

So what you have is a second group of videos that are arbitrarily late. You could argue they “keep the discussion going,” but in reality, they look odd in timing — and often aren’t even seen. We can ignore the negativity that they also create with the whole “if its bad I bet they waited to do the review” kind of stuff.

This affects a channel deeply. If you’re part of that second review group, you get fewer views — even though you’re covering the same big game.

And that’s the kicker-

Real-World Consequences

To a company deciding who gets future review codes, this all looks incredibly negative.
This video has terrible numbers, but the game is huge, so the company COULD waste time trying to figure it out but why? Also it’s a review and after a couple days all reviews are labeled 1 week ago, 2 weeks, 3. The specific day drops from instant searches resulting in the video looking like it under-performed in direct contest with everything else.

My Experiences Recently

This situation occurred twice. The first time, a couple of weeks ago, I ate it and will explain what that means a bit later.
The 2nd time I decided to test the results in a real world fashion. How does this impact future requests.
I signed into a website I’ve been helping some industry providers put together that distributes review codes.

I feed it my channel data, hit “Request Code.”

Denied.

“We are sorry but currently your channel does not meet view number metrics requirements.” - Those metrics took the last 5 Youtube videos and averaged them. The typical 200k-300k turned to less than 40k per video.

Most sites check the last four to six videos and average your views to decide if your numbers have dropped, if you have changed format, if you are just not doing the same thing. My viewers average were cut to a fourth of normal. That not only hurts the channel and income — it hurts future requests for later games.
Also this is why most don’t do live podcasts on their main channels anymore. Its actively feeding negative feedback into the request process.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Let’s talk numbers.

A secondary embargo, especially on a bad release day — say, the first group goes Tuesday (the best YouTube release day), and yours goes Friday (the worst) — you’re looking at a maximum of 10–15% of the views you could get day one with the combination of excitement and your channel subscribers.

That’s it.

So, 36 hours of review time, 4 hours of edit and prep, 1 hour uploading and fact-checking — for one-tenth the expected return.

To cover these games I passed up 3 other games. not knowing it was a dual embargo.
Resulting in more losses of time.

Now, I’m a channel that doesn’t do dual embargoes. It’s actually in our guidelines that we don’t, for these exact reasons — and because it can make creators who come later look like they “matter less.” or “took a code just to get a code”

No One Deserves a Code

One thing about me — I don’t think anyone deserves a code. Not IGN, Gamespot, not Gamerranx not anyone.

Yes I see the posts from some offenders “We previewed the game why don’t we get a code?” Veiled social signaling aside an embargo for one doesn’t mean you get another.

This is just about review timing — and not being told when others go live.

Why Do Companies Do It?

You might think to yourself, “Well, why is it done?”

In all honesty, even talking to PR reps I’ve spoken with, there isn’t much reason. Often, it’s simply to ease coverage allotment — to make it easier to give out codes — or from the ancient idea that one group would be more frivolous with embargoes than another.

Now, as we all know, I’ve broken an embargo once — one time in over 1,000 videos I’ve reviewed.

There are websites created less than two years ago that have broken it nine times — and they still get codes. That’s just how it works.

You could also have an embargo where you don’t want someone to play the entire game, and that’s fine — those are separated. But that’s not what this is.

The Secrecy Problem

What’s interesting is that in many non-dual embargo setups (like separate preview, streaming, and review times), those NDAs are very open.

They clearly state:

• There’s a preview time.

• A streaming time.

• A live/social time.

But the caginess of dual embargoes — the hush-hush secrecy — makes it far worse. It’s not just the scheduling difficulty. It’s the intentional obscurity.

-”All reviews should be held to…” Indicates that all reviews are held to that time. Which is patently untrue.

The Algorithm and the Aftermath

So what does all this mean?

Usually I can usually look at a review and predict roughly how it’ll perform. YouTube’s algorithm is designed not just to show you what’s “relevant,” but what it thinks you’ll care about based on your past.

After all this? I’ll likely get about one-twentieth of the expected views.

On average, I’m right about my view estimates 9 out of 10 times. When I’m off, it’s by 75% less or 225% more. Even at 75% less, it would’ve covered my time.

This one? A dual embargo video might make $40 No exaggeration.
Especially if the Youtube Algorithm hasn’t been fed with expectations of late coverage

The Bottom Line

Dual embargoes not only feed into conspiracies which aren’t true they arbitrarily harm anyone creating content, websites, you-tubers, tik-tok.

Anyway thats it. Just some data for you

Ghost of Yōtei Review – Steel, Snow, and Spirit

Few things are more satisfying than slicing through a line of enemies, wiping your blade clean, and then settling your bare ass into a hot spring to contemplate the moral decay of your soul. Ghost of Tsushima understood this — and Ghost of Yōtei remembers. But it doesn’t just echo the original. It flips the script, cracks the ice under your feet, and asks what happens when there was never any samurai code to break in the first place.

Welcome back to the world of wandering warriors and windblown guidance and a bit of slaughter, dipping mellons in hot water and then going back out again.

A Shift in Ghosts

Where Tsushima was the story of a noble unraveling under the pressure of war, Yōtei centers on Atsu — a mercenary, not a samurai. She’s not falling from grace. She never had any to begin with. After her family is murdered by the Yōtei Six — a rogues’ gallery of twisted ex-samurai, each named like bad omens — she dons the guise of the Onrew, a spirit of vengeance, and sets out to carve her justice into the land with steel.
Which basically just means she grabs a random sword and chases them down. Sure its not the most complex of stories but it is hilarious that they don’t seem to worry about you even when your cleaving fingers off the hand of rulership.

Set in 1603, the game trades Tsushima’s golden fields for snow-choked ruins, avalanche-prone peaks, and enough windshield to freeze your moral compass. This isn’t a spiritual sequel. It’s a spiritual possession. And you’re the blade being wielded.

The Six and the Setting

The Yōtei Six, your attempeted murderers, are the design backbone. Each represents a theme, a fighting style, a philosophy — and a target. The Snake, the Oni, the Spider, the Dragon.
I loved these guys. The Snake’s intro, for instance, is storytelling through staging. You light his house on fire and wait as he slides out, masks up, and sighs like someone preparing to die. It’s weary, inevitable — and brilliant. And that’s just the first bastard that I took down like a fresh ass twinkie.

The game lets you hunt them in a loosely open order. It’s not the full Breath of the Wild sandbox — it’s more “choose the order of your funeral guests.” There’s room for flexibility, but it’s still guided. The sandbox isn’t there to let you play. It’s there to let you bury people in it.

Combat – A New Formula for Familiar Death

Combat still has that Ghost DNA — fair, fluid, ferocious — but the stance system from Tsushima has been honorably discharged. Instead, you wield five core weapons, each a class unto itself.

• Katana: Your balanced baseline. Precision, practice, perfection.

• Dual Katanas: A blur of slashes, ideal for crowd control and aggressive pushes.

• Odachi: The oversized battlefield broom. If it moves, it dies. If it doesn’t, it still might die.

• Spear: Your zoning tool. Pokes enemies from range, controls space.

• Kusarigama: A chain blade that feels like a rhythm game on meth. You don’t wield it so much as ride it into chaos.

Every weapon has its own role, tempo, and counters. You’re not just switching stances anymore — you’re switching strategies. Katana vs. katana duels are high-stakes chess matches. Dual blades carve through archers. The Odachi mows down groups with wide swings that feel like you’re trying to punish the air for existing. The Kusarigama? It’s what happens when a drum kit and a weaponized blender have a baby.

It builds up this flexible combat. Need to crowd-clear? Swap to the right tool mid-fight. Want to duel with flair? Katana’s your stage. Want to make a statement? Drop a dude with a spear, juggle another with a chain, then Odachi the third through a snowbank.

Combat isn’t just style — it’s jazz. Improvisation in the midst of precision.

Defensive Instinct and Offensive Pressure

Parries still shine, but now they evolve. Misdirection pushes. Disarms. Enemies can kick your blade away, forcing you to roll, scramble, and pick it up mid-fight. You can catch arrows mid-air like a pissed-off baseball coach who didn’t get his weekend fast-pitch.

This game doesn’t want you hiding behind a block button. It wants you to move. Dance. React. Circle a tree mid-fight to buy time. Leap in. Dodge out. Everything feeds into a combat system that feels more alive — and more chaotic — than its predecessor. You’re not fencing. You’re surviving.

Can you beat the game with one weapon? Technically, yes. But good luck trying to crowd-control a group of spear-wielders with just your katana. The game rewards adaptability. And punishes stubbornness.

Stealth and Exploration – Quiet Moments of Death

Stealth’s expanded. Vertical infiltration, spyglass scouting, environmental cues — it’s all here. You can kick a sword into your hand off the ground and chuck it into someone’s spine. Chain kills let you stack corpses like firewood. Larger enemies? If your skills are right, you can take them out without hesitation. However if your not trained up in the assassinate skill enough prepare to have them fight you off.

Exploration is both meditative and brutal. Ride through snowstorms. Paint scenes. Bathe in hot springs. Yes, again. Because nothing says healing like sitting in another man’s soup water. You’re given freedom — but not breadcrumb trails. The game avoids the “golden path” handholding of lesser open-worlds. It trusts you to notice. To listen. To look. And it rewards that.

There’s a difference between finding and discovering. Yōtei understands that difference.

Visuals – A Myth, Not a Museum

This isn’t a textbook Japan. This is the mythic of one. Cherry blossoms fall like they’ve got something to prove. Trees whip in violent winds. Pollen swirls in patterns like ritual. The world feels like it’s breathing with you — or against you.

On the Playstation 5, the game offers performance-wise, you get your holy trinity: 60fps performance, 30fps with ray tracing, or high-resolution 30. Combat animations are excellent, and despite a few moments where input timing felt slightly mushy in large-scale fights, the visual clarity mostly keeps up with the chaos.

I loved the look of it just taking out enemies blasting through groups of enemies and then sliding back into the shadows.

Audio – Spirit of the Sword

The soundtrack blends lo-fi textures with traditional Japanese melodies and ambient dread. It’s atmosphere over anthem. You feel tension crawl through your bones as you approach a boss, then relief wash over you as snow settles after the battle. This is a soundtrack you could listen to outside the game and still feel like a ghost might be watching.

Voice work is excellent across languages, with the Yōtei Six delivering monologues that range from chilling to downright psychotic. There’s one small hiccup — flashbacks where Atsu sounds older than her own mother, like someone voicing their childhood with 36-year-old smoker vibes. Weird, but not a deal-breaker.

Environmental audio is pinpoint. Frogs croak beneath bridges. Steel scrapes in the snow. Fire crackles behind you. A body slamming into mud sounds exactly like it should — heavy, wet, and final.

Flow and Fracture

This all sounds great — and mostly is — but Yōtei has a few moments of dissonance. Its openness, while liberating, occasionally dips into directionlessness. Sometimes the narrative backs off too far. You train in a new weapon… only to find out the game cuts away before your trial fight. There’s a touch of uneven pacing that rears up every few hours, more so than in Tsushima.

But the personal nature of side quests — the humor, the slice-of-life — anchors it. Not everything needs to be fate-of-the-world drama. Sometimes it’s about helping a drunk find his pants. Or challenging a bandit to a tavern game just because it feels right.

Spirit of the Blade – Final Thoughts

So where does Ghost of Yōtei land?

It doesn’t outdo Tsushima in every way. It doesn’t need to. It improves in many — combat, flexibility, biomes, and personal storytelling — and shifts tone from redemption to revenge which feels awesome. It’s a game that invites violence and offers moments of peace, only to remind you you’re a sword… and someone still needs cutting.

If Tsushima was about bending the code, Yōtei is about building your own. Not noble. Not dishonorable. Just... inevitable.

Buy this game. It’s worth it. Not because it’s perfect — but because it knows exactly what it wants to be. And it does that with elegance, fury, and a little bit of bathwater.

My video on this
Hands on The Lift

Handy but Hazardous

The Lift impressed me in my recent hands-on. Every once in a while, you play a game that feels like somebody bolted together three different genres, sealed it shut with duct tape, and then waved their hands over it while whispering vibes. The Lift is exactly that. Imagine The Vanishing of Ethan Carter went on a road trip with Firewatch and picked up Remedy's Control somewhere on the side of the highway. And maybe they listened to a couple BBC audio dramas along the way. I'm going to cover everything about it that I can from my 3+ hours hands-on.

The Lift is a first-person supernatural handyman simulator. So far, no lonely housewives have been waiting for me to unclog their plumbing, but I'm crossing my fingers. In the meantime, I've been rewiring doors, putting furniture back together, restarting mysterious lifts and elevators, and I got a generator running by fueling it with a fusion-driven bumblebee. That's right. I'm running around the game world with a bumblebee that's probably putting out enough radiation to fry my nuts like two popcorn kernels. So, I ended up sprinting over, getting rid of it as fast as I could. But this game and the interactions with it are all analog. Meaning you’re opening a door, moving a contraption, rewiring a system, then putting the bumblebee inside, then doing the same thing again, then trying to align systems to get the generator running. Success is hearing that generator whistle into being, spinning like a poorly balanced tumble dryer from the 1980s, and me just sitting there wondering the entire time about my reproductive system’s future chances. But in this game, them's the breaks.

Speaking of breaks, between here and the game's release, there will be one. Made by Fantastic Signals and coming out in 2026, this is a preview in hand, but one that's subject to whatever changes may occur in the distance between the preview and whenever this finally comes out. Here's my time with it so you can decide if it's worth your time to check it out.

The Setup

The setup is this: you wake up from stasis to find yourself the new maintenance man in a massive abandoned scientific complex, a giant satellite of sorts. Something went wrong. The original caretaker seems to be gone. The world outside hums with strange vibes, and you're left to piece it all back together. And right away, you end up noticing the world is also designed in an almost maliciously misdesigned way. Bench seats next to a generator powered by a magical atomic bumblebee the size of a toddler's head? Check. Who doesn't want to relax within spitting distance of a three-inch stinger that doubles as a car battery?

This game lives in an uncanny space where the mundane collides with the outright absurd, and it never lets you forget it. Little bits of it constantly make you question exactly what's going on here. And that mystery of the magical and mechanical actually mixes up with the dirt-on-your-hands style gameplay. That “let's get this [__] running” feel of an oil rig.

At its heart, The Lift is about mixing different things—not in a click-menu, watch-a-bar-fill-up sense, but in the tactile analog way. You twist, you screw, you flip, and you wire. Early puzzles start pretty small—power conduits, simple connections—and then slowly scale up into motors, gear sets, and stranger contraptions. What's been refreshing is the sense of escalation. You're not thrown into random puzzles for the sake of variety; you're actually layering different skills you've used right before that, reusing what you've learned and applying them in more complex contexts. And sometimes you're doing the very mundane. It's certainly not hyper-complex, but there's enough there to keep you consistently looking around.

Of Tools and Timing

What I like the most about this is also that every object you interact with looks like it actually belongs to the game world, but is also intractable. You have none of that pixel-hunting nightmare from old adventure games where the key item is a slightly brighter pixel in a sea of gray. Here, handles, screws, panels—they all stand out just enough with the artistic design itself to invite you to tinker and also to alert you right away that you can either pick it up or read it. And tinkering is the heart and soul of the game, and reading is really the mind of it.

The game has a uniquely skewed system for commerce as well. You see, everything in the game world costs money that you need, like lights and wiring to fix boxes. Sure, you'll find some stuff along the way, but a lot of it is because you're just penniless. And because you're a mechanic, you have to end up finding a way to get that cash. So, by grabbing trash, you can take it to a trash compactor, smash it up, and boom, you get yourself a fancy futuristic metal ha’penny of sorts. That can then be used to buy those items or repair different broken parts.

As you repair those items in the game world, you restore the station to power, and it builds out power in a wave. That wave needs to be a certain strength to get you to the next location in the station. But there's a hint here of something even further—a small trinket of a story about the wave going out into the universe and possibly keeping humanity or the universe going. But for the time I got to play the demo, I only got the smallest snippets around the overall construction idea and the reasons for this place existing.

The Good and The Weird

And it does cause you to ask questions. Why do some items in the game world have a shimmering double-model look to them, like two tea kettles trying to occupy the same space in your dimension? There was a good deal of mystery even right up until I stopped. But during that time, I picked up on the overall look that the game wants to deliver.

The Lift leans cartoony, but with a lot of polish. It's not rough indie jank, but it's not trying to be photorealistic either. Think pretty clean lines, bold colors, and surreal edges. At times, there's the smallest echo of Control, but not nearly as existential. Just a tinge that swaps out that oppressive techno-dystopian gray for something easier on the eyes, but still a bit cosmic, more colorful, more approachable, but possibly still just as weird behind the scenes.

Characters you meet are equally strange. There's a cyborg trader with an abacus bolted onto his chest. And that right there tells you what the game is actually going for. Everyone, everything is part of a puzzle, part of a prop, and a little bit part of a mystery. It's an intriguing look and one that I'm hoping can carry on the mystery and whatever they're trying to actually do in this game. But I did like it.

I also enjoyed the sound. Here's the thing: you might think visuals are what set the mood in games like this, and they do, but not all of it. Some of it's the music. In Control, the soundtrack made you feel like the walls themselves just wanted you dead, or at least scared of [__]. And in The Lift, you get—well, you get sort of elevator music. Not literally, but close. It's very soft tunes, meandering chords, something that hovers between lo-fi chill beats and liminal elevator hum. No matter where I explored or what I was doing, that soundtrack lulled me into a weird false sense of calm, even though nothing leaps out to try to kill you. There's a tension at odds with that audio that I liked.

The voice acting—I haven't got to play a lot. Talked to a couple characters. So far, it's limited, but it's solid. The few characters I did meet—the mysterious overseer, the trader, the odd job giver—all deliver their lines with just enough information to pull you deeper without overselling the weirdness. They also fit solidly into the audio space so far, with really good mixing and feeling like they're actually there.

Speaking of actually being there, if the performance wasn't up to snuff, we'd have an issue with that. Early build disclaimer, sure, but it actually runs pretty decently. Stutter here or there, a hiccup when entering a new area, but nothing catastrophic. Movement does feel clunky at times, like you've got pipes catching your head, jumps that don't quite line up, the occasional “why can't I stand on this obvious box” kind of moment. But that looseness fits the world. It's not about pixel-perfect platforming. It's about improvising with what you’ve got. And so far, it's delivering well.

Whats the Hook?

But what's the hook? Especially in a preview this far out, that's the question. I would say solidly, it's just mystery. Games like this live or die on atmosphere. And while the puzzle scaffolding is very solid, it's the mystery that makes you lean forward. It's that connection between the two. Propaganda posters hint at corporations pulling strings. Journals suggest the caretaker before you didn't exactly leave willingly. And every room you repair, every conduit you wire back to life, feels like you're nudging the world closer to revealing one more secret.

My huge worry for the game—a massive one at that—is that it won't continue to build on the puzzle work throughout. That it may shy away from the building of complexity from the actual scaffolding of the prior things you learn. We've seen many games do that, where they level off at a particular time and don't actually build on that complexity.

Now, is The Lift for everybody? No. Some of you are going to bounce right off this and its slower pace, at least as it's presented now. Its obsession with screws and panels. Its refusal to put combat front and center. But if you're the kind of person who loses hours assembling Lego sets, or you've got unreasonable excitement from tightening a bolt in VR, this game might actually sink its hooks into you. It's not horror. It's not action. It's something else. A chill yet unsettling handyman simulator that carves out its own weird corner. I went in curious. I came out more interested than I expected. And if the devs can keep layering mystery on top of the satisfying little puzzle pieces, The Lift might actually—well—lift that genre just a notch higher.

That's it for me. I would love for you guys to subscribe to the channel—helps—or check out the Patreon

Firefighting Simulator Ignite Impressions

You roll out of the bay, blip the siren (because you can), and the game immediately asks the same question every sim secretly does: would you do this job versus play the digital version of it? Firefighting Simulator: Ignite is shockingly enjoyable even if you answered no to either. It’s PowerWash if the muck could flashover and eat your eyebrows, a co-op toybox where fires opinion of every structure is what a hurricane thinks of Florida. It’s also the kind of sim where “solid… sometimes” is a compliment and “competent… occasionally” reads like a love letter.

Visually, it’s that utilitarian, steel-toed look—the one where glossy next-gen screenshots would actually make it worse. Buildings light like tinderboxes but without the Michael Bay glitter. Texture work won’t win a prom crown, but the star here is fire that crawls, breathes, and then sprints if you feed it air like an idiot opening a door at the wrong time. Embers spin up into little devil dervishes and the smoke has layers—dark, angry blankets that mean “don’t go in there unless your will’s up to date.” Performance though still has some wonkiness while the FPS was great, even on the 4090 there was some pop-in especially when going home from a big fire.

Audio stays in pocket. On the truck it’s oddly EV-ish—more hum than hell—but once you’re inside the structure it clicks: rafters complaining, drywall crackling as fire eats away at its supports, a hiss from a propane tank that makes you say nope and re-route. It’s less “memorable bangers” and more “honest situational sound,” and in a game where air movement is life or death, that pays its rent.

When it comes to Audio, would it kill the crew to say something on the ride home, though? A stray “nice save” between “we almost died” and “we almost died again” wouldn’t hurt. Right now the drive back is a morgue with seatbelts.

The loop is pure firefighter homework dressed as chaos. You’re picking missions off the station board (career laddering you from greaser stove tops to multi-alarm lunacy), rolling out, sizing up, placing the rig, grabbing the right tool, then deciding which mistake you want to make first. Locate the hydrant, lay supply, run two attack lines, get ventilation going, then juggle victims, breakers, gas, and “oh fun, the garage is a liquid bomb.” The station hub is roomy—half training hall, half museum—clearly built with future DLC and mod space in mind; right now it’s a staging area with personality but not much pulse. No emergent alarms on the drive, no surprise calls popping off mid-mission. You pick, you go, you clean up. It works, but it’s very “board game night,” not “shift from hell.”

Your tools feel right, and by “right” I mean occasionally explained but always useful somewhere. Water streams have weight, pattern actually matters, and foam isn’t just “white water” cosplay—it’s the difference between clearing a grease fire or turning a deli into a pipe bomb when you hit the wrong fire type with the wrong fire retardent. The best toy is information: a sensible “fire sense” read that highlights breakers, valves, trapped civilians, and suspect doors without turning the whole map into XRAY Vision Man. It tells you just enough to stop you being stupid while still letting you be stupid if that’s your brand.

Then there’s your crew: three AI firefighters who, on their best days, behave like overachieving rookies and on their worst, stand in a hallway contemplating the metaphysics of flame. The command wheel is fast and readable—break that door, pull an attack line, search and rescue there, follow me—and the game lands the tactile bits: spinning hydrants, slamming irons, shouldering through stubborn frames. But AI tempo isn’t consistent. For example I saw one of my guys just blasting a random stack of what looked like CD’s for 5 minutes while the rest of us fought the real fires.
. They can nail a ladder throw or pop a panel one minute and the next they’ll proclaim a room “clear” while the upstairs is inventing new colors of orange. Soloing with them works if you accept that “go here” often needs the follow-me chaperone and that you’re the foam/water brain of the outfit. With humans? Suddenly the whole thing sings. Four-man coordination is where Ignite proves the sim bones aren’t a marketing memo.

Driving is… fine. You’re shepherding big red rectangles with expensive bits hanging off the sides, threading traffic without turning sedans into modern art.

Bugs and grit exist. Pop-ins at scene load, the occasional hitch when a neighborhood wakes up, some “are you kidding me” AI pathing around tight geometry, and a UI that hides a couple crucial toggles one menu deeper than you want—especially when swapping truck systems mid-panic. Nothing breaks the fantasy, but it does scuff the helmet a bit. Especially if say you want to get your AI to grab something then fight the fire right next to them without them resetting their position and possibly running downstairs because a small fire is burning up a bush.

Two design calls hit hard. First, consequences make sense in a way games often fake. Open a door wrong, you earn a backdraft lesson you won’t forget. Vent too late, you choke. Bring water to a chemical fire, you escalate. It’s a rare sim where “right tool, right tactic, right timing” isn’t a poster on a wall; it’s carved into your eyebrows. Second, mission construction is a legit puzzle box. Ladder to cut off spread here, alternate entry there, cool the ceiling for two beats then drive the seat—every blaze is a little math problem with victims in the parentheses.

What’s missing is that end-of-shift soul. The station feels like it wants chatter, little post-mortems, maybe a chalkboard of greatest hits and dumbest mistakes. As is, you dock, click, and you’re back on the board. No ones doing much and it just feels lifeless there.

That being said, bottom line: in the early hours, there’s a sturdy, sometimes-surly sim under the turnout gear. It’s not a tech showpiece and it’s not pretending to be. It’s about reading fire like weather, making smart calls under stupid pressure, and laughing when your buddy hoses down a sandwich shop while the grease fire throws him a wedding ring made of napalm. With mods and more missions, this could be the firefighter sandbox folks have been waiting for. Right now, it’s already fun—sometimes surprisingly so—and when it catches fire, or something else does, it really catches.

—

On September 19, Dying Light: The Beast arrives not as a triumphant sequel, nor a desperate spinoff, but as some strange, snarling hybrid child of community demand and corporate reorientation and a not a small amount of misfortune. Like the returning main character, a subject of bad fortune and timing, the DLC turned full release also came about the same way.
A leaked storyline, bad timing, and a group of people getting together and saying, like Crane himself, lets not give up! Lets go bigger.

A monster created by a monster.

Born from the ashes of a planned DLC for Dying Light 2, this unexpected entry claws its way into the light with a mission not to expand the universe, but to constrict it—into something leaner, angrier, and far more personal.

I spent hours with a preview build, and yes, this is Dying Light 2.5—not by number, but by narrative DNA. The return of Kyle Crane, thought dead but instead marinated for over a decade in pain, trauma, and what seems like a 12-year long underground MMA fight with a man named "The Baron," If that name sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon villain, it's only because no one warned you just how cruel Saturday mornings can be. Torture, mutation, and survival have rendered Crane something else now—neither man nor monster, but a whisper-thin veil between both who tearasses around a new forested town location in a game promising to be a bit less over the top than the original.

The setting is a haunted divide between the dense, whispering Castor Woods and its nearby urban spillover—amplifies this mutation. Not just Crane’s, but the series’. The Beast leans horror not through gimmick but through tone. It’s not scarier because it adds more blood; it’s scarier because it subtracts comfort. Verticality has returned, as has parkour, but so too has vulnerability. Whether stalking through an abandoned shop filled with breathless moans or navigating the forest's corpse filled confines, there is always the worry that what you face, will become your face.

The Beasts Rise

Crane’s gameplay mutation manifests mechanically. The much-touted "Beast Mode" transforms him into a temporary demolition of flesh and bone—tearing through enemies with bare hands, hurling environmental death, and trading stealth for spectacle. But it’s a trade with a timer. And once it expires, you’re back to the thin edge of survival. That friction—the flicker between predator and prey—is the game’s soul.

Combat, predictably, feels like a polished echo of Dying Light 2. Swings, dodges, kicks, and blocks play out in kinetic poetry. But this time, there’s an edge of cruelty to it. The infected don’t just flail; they leer, they stalk, and they ambush. Gunplay has been refined with a satisfying heft, though audio feedback still lags behind the desired brutality. Weapon crafting remains absurd and delightful, with electric machetes and exploding shovels coexisting in Crane’s bloodstained arsenal. It’s dumb. It’s glorious.

Gone is the crowd-driven chaos of urban carnage; instead here is silence, misdirection, and the distant sound of wind through rotted branches and some shambling body eater 2 levels above you.

Yet for all its ambition, the scars of its DLC origins remain. NPCs are stiff mannequins of exposition, anchored to base interiors with barely a murmur unless prompted. The plot—centered on revenge and identity—is gated behind the full release, leaving me a bit at odds as to what exactly was going on.
Multiplayer returns but scaled back; factions have been thinned to two ideologies, the Harvesters and the Pure, and narrative complexity suffers for it.

Not all is changed though!

But there is artistry here. In the quiet stealth sections where every creak is a question. In the janky, unpredictable moments of parkour desperation. In the beauty of a setting sun hitting broken buildings and making them look almost holy. Dying Light: The Beast isn’t subtle, but it is sincere and when enemies bleed its always fun.

Performance-wise, the game holds its own. Locked 60 FPS on current-gen consoles, DLSS 3.0 for PC players, and visuals that evoke more tone than tech demo. It looks good, yes. But more importantly, it feels right—like an epilogue that was never meant to exist, but now refuses to die.

Ultimately, The Beast is a recalibration sort of but not a massive change. A reminder that horror doesn’t need to be vast. It needs to be close. In your ear. In your lungs. In your nightmares. And yet it doesn’t shift far enough to feel like a full sequel so far.

More a large expansion. And I am fine with that

Lego Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight

Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight ended up being one of the biggest surprises at Gamescom. I expected another fun but forgettable Lego title, something light and simple. What I saw instead looked like the combat had been lifted straight out of the Arkham series. Counters, combos, finishers—the kind of flow you associate with Rocksteady, not with Lego bricks. And it worked. It looked fluid, sharp, and instantly better than anything the Lego games have tried before. Even if, at times, I was like “Oh damn someones getting a letter from a lawyer!”

They also announced adjustable difficulty, which might sound small but could make a huge difference. If the combat really does carry some of Arkham’s weight, players are going to want the option to tune it. Visually it continued that insane polish the Lego games and movies have continued to show now for a couple years. Toys almost too clean to have ever been played with but you can still imagine a giant child just out of camera singing “na na na na naa na naaa Batman!”

Out of everything I saw at the show, this was the trailer that stuck with me. It looked tremendous, and for the first time in years, I’m actually excited for a Lego game.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 finally showed up at Gamescom with something fans have been waiting years for: a release date. After so many delays, false starts, and studio changes, just seeing the game with a firm date attached felt almost unreal. It carried the weight of Dead Island 2’s long crawl back from development hell—a reminder that sometimes, against all odds, projects do survive.

What was shown looked solid if a little rough. The combat animations still had that jank, which oddly enough felt right in line with the original. The first Bloodlines was a broken mess at launch, only later saved by community patches. But underneath all the cracks there was always something compelling—a world and a tone that no other RPG quite matched. The hope now is that this sequel can channel that same spirit while actually delivering a functional game from day one. We have seen it in the past, just look at Dead Island 2 which got orphaned enough you would have thought it was the digital equal of that kid in the movie Omen.

Not everything was encouraging. News that two clans are locked behind preorder tiers sucks. Still, the core idea of walking back into the shadows of a vampire-run city is too enticing to ignore.

Bloodlines 2 may never be perfect, but if it captures even part of the atmosphere and branching intrigue of its predecessor, it will be worth the long wait. Gamescom reminded me that despite all the baggage, I still want to leap in and sexy talk some club owner while doing the worst animated dance in a game until Mass Effect Shepparded us into terror with his nightclub shimmy.

The Outer Worlds 2

The Outer Worlds 2 showed up at Gamescom with another trailer leaning into its offbeat sense of humor, even opening with Jean-Ralphio from Parks and Rec. It was sharp, funny, and in line with the first game’s tone, but also left me with mixed feelings. The producers have said this sequel will have less comedy overall, which makes the marketing an odd contrast. Still, the humor works, and the reminder that companions matter more than endings felt true to how most of us remember games like this.

What I saw of the companions looked familiar—almost too familiar. Hammer guy, quickshot girl, archetypes that felt a little recycled from the first game. That doesn’t mean they’ll play the same once you actually spend time with them, but the trailer didn’t do much to sell them as fresh. I want them to feel distinct, not just a re-skin of what came before.

Visually and structurally, though, The Outer Worlds 2 looked great. Performance reportedly held up well in previews, NPCs and towns had more life, and the October 29th release date drops it right into an already crowded season. One thing we still haven’t really seen is the role of the spaceship, which in the first game was one of the best parts of the structure—your home base, your crew’s quarters, your safe spot that could also take off into the unknown. I hope that sense of ownership and separation carries over.

Overall, The Outer Worlds 2 looked promising, even if it didn’t wow me with originality. If Obsidian can refine the systems, deepen the companions, and keep the world performance solid, this sequel could be a strong step forward rather than just a repeat of the first.

What about you>?

A new WB Live Service Game Incoming

Now, of all times, Warner Brothers once again kneels at the altar of the live service idol. After the publicly embalmed corpse of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was wheeled out half dead then flicked into the road for nature to take its course, with a 41% revenue implosion and a wave of layoffs that tore through its creative ranks like shrapnel, one might assume introspection would follow. Not WB. Like a lovelorn gambler returning to the same fixed god-damned table, WB Games is now hiring for a new live service project, promising another AAA title based on "iconic IP."

Listen, I love me some games so seeing them try again isn’t some monolithic weight on my shoulders. However, there is a kind of industrial insanity here, the kind one discovers by treating spreadsheets like ancient spell-books, where a single hit game—a Destiny, a Fortnite, a Genshin Impact—is not a product but a perpetual motion machine if you get the reagents right. Executives dream of one good roll funding a thousand failures. Never mind that most service games collapse beneath their own weight, even if generating money. Few do more than exist like a dormant black hole, there but unseen unless looked for. Fine for the industry and the company when it comes to financials but not exciting enough to visit the thing after its surprise runs thin.

Blaming WB alone though is a wider shot than I want to take. This is the economy of games in contraction. These steps have been repeated in every single industry once maturity is met. “Oh but the industry is so young compared to others”. Ignoring, just for a brief moment that by comparing you ARE indicating there can be outliers, really most industries mature along the same general lines.

• Saturation - Competition

  • Console growth in particular has been stagnant for 2 generations and the growing PC market has no specific generation requirements resulting in one large lump

• Consolidation - Cost Fitting

  • Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of companies merged in the last 5 years, and yet cost fitting is at its highest ever

• Radical innovation - Incremental Improvements

  • Consoles, in particular, transitioned to PC specific technology and software suites, ultimately stalling innovative technical growth but improving cross platform possibilities.

Gaming has actually matured slower than many other industries but the recent combination of lack of growth and competing outgoing investments markets shadowing the future growth like a god damned asteroid settling into orbit instead of instantly smashing the earth into 1000 separate bits each with their own Walmart, has pushed it forward into its next phase.

The heady years are over. The feast has ended. Revenue plummets, costs rise, and studios turn to models that promise eternal returns not because they are crazy, it’s because financially the proof exists. A single large scale like service game brings in an almost 9 to 1 profit, requires less staff than sequel after sequel and lets the company move assets from one project to another. Look no further than a company like NetMarble where a single game, albeit a successful one, could fund 2-3 AAA games if directly transferred.

Every single developer or publisher I discuss this with, have all made it very clear. Every single company considered the possibility of a service game, if only, to give them the breath to create a title they want to.

As an industry we are consistently set on from all sides, in the past parent groups(perhaps now as well…check out the next bit), growing costs, rubber-band technology progress, and players in a market profoundly entrenched in throttling the shit out of one another until everyone was dead.

In WB’s case, what I would hope to see is a service game delivered that does well, that isn’t the miasma of hopelessness and lack of leadership like Destiny but ultimately one more engaging and forward thinking than Division, and one with a wider spectrum of entertainment than fortnight or Rob-lox.
What I am probably going to get is something based on an idea James Gunn regurgitated in the last fawnfest corporate meeting he had.

Burn it to the Ground

Meanwhile, in a different corner of the collapsing cathedral known as gaming, Grounded 2 arrives into early access not with pomp but with the slow, careful tread of a developer that knows its world, knows its players, and more importantly, knows not to over promise. It is the quiet inverse of say WB spectacle: a game launched not to dazzle shareholders but to cultivate long-term interest. Here, early access is not code for "we're not done, but please pay anyway," but rather a long handshake between creator and audience.

Though it is a limp one.
Performance issues, bugs, and honestly a deep familiarity with the first game that’s so close its like all the stories of someone sleeping with their wife’s twin sister because they lights were dim and we always thought “sure dude…sure.”
Play Grounded 2 for awhile and you may begin to second guess your suspicions. New biomes sure, and some basic setup changes and graphics that can occasionally show you what it can do but seems just as happy to show you what your 4090 can’t do. Grounded 2 is both good in many ways and also a sad reminder that Early Access, in gaming, has very little equivalent in the real world.

Imagine if a musician gave you half a song, told you it could change, but it was recorded at 4kb and you had to play it on a specific digital player? See that great car, go buy it, sure we may remove the 4 doors and put in a hatchback and the performance may get better, it may not, hell the color could change too but keep making the payments otherwise the color it changes to is…
Invisible.

I am tentitively still for early access but its consistent balance between developer solidarity and fan interaction also runs afoul of the biggest mistake of mankind. To consistently over estimate its ability. In terms of Early Access the ability constantly strained is gamer memory.

Games come into early access and a week later gamer’s treat it like its final, in some ways they have to as there is no way a human can remember every single game. But then 4 weeks later they forget they have it because something else came out, then 9 weeks after that they find out it released a patch so they go back and the slow trickle down of the loop starts again.
Early access isn’t as simple as you get input, or the devs need money to keep employed, or we have some ideas but we aren’t sure. Its a convoluted mess. Add on subscriptions like Gamepass and it becomes something altogether unwiedly.

Luckily Grounded 2 has the blueprint of the first game to guide it. Ignoring the fact that the reliance on the blueprint goes all the way back to the start of the logic loop of games supposedly all feeling the same and without innovation…

At some point you have to be prepared.

If Warner Bros represents blind hope and Grounded 2 cautious confidence, the darkest thread in this weeks tapestry coils around Steam, censorship, and the silent tyranny of finance. Recently Steam and then Itch.io removed the ability to purchase particular types of titles on their stores and stated that payment processors were the culprits.
Ya the sexy types of games.

The idea that Visa and other payment processors, pushed by social groups, can dictate the content of a digital storefront through unspoken pressure—threatening to pull the plug on controversial games not by law but by transaction denial—is a horror show wrapped in corporate laziness to the point of an almost flat-lined preparedness pulse. It is not government agents kicking down doors. It is banks, disapproving quietly. Games about eating disorders, historical tragedies, or raw sexuality vanish not with a ruling, but with a payment error, or a 404 link not found.
Worse yet, its occurred on the watch of those who, supposedly know better.

Valve, ever the libertarian cathedral, slept through it. In this moment, where the store that claims to be the world's open platform stands idle as its shelves are cleared by silence, we should not just question Valve's preparedness. We should question its fucking purpose. Thirty percent of every sale from every single developer goes to them For what? So they can make a god damned FPS counter? So they can show their ineptitude at making an even slightly acceptable search algorithm that doesn’t spit up like a drunk after pouring rubbing alcohol through white bread and trying to drink it?

No defense of artistic risk. No resistance to financial censorship. No clarity in policies were ready. Just the void, algorithmic and indifferent, and completely utterly unprepared for something that was about as surprising and seeing the sun snuffed out and thinking “Damn might get cold tonight”

They should have had marked defenses in place for this, as it’s their core income, they should have been able to stymie this with lawyers that made Sonys team that tripped up Microsoft look like recent graduates from an AI law firm.
This is a world where yes even payment processors get stymied in court, in fact there is a history of it, especially if…you know, someone does something!

Do I blame them for it happening? No of course not. You don’t yell at a fucking tree if you trip on a branch you’re not a god damned idiot. But if you have someone who is supposed to trim the tree then a limb falls off and plummets through the body of some poor jogger…someones getting fired.
Valve, Itch, Ubisoft, Sony, MS, even Joe Blow with his 2 dollar website he vibe coded better be ready for this stuff. Because there is always someone out there ready to take your shit.

If there's a lesson here, it isn't just that Warner Brothers has learned nothing, or that Steam is governed by ghosts that somehow got corpulent on the psychological pushing of digital shadow backlogs.

It's that gaming in 2025 teeters at the edge of two cliffs: one of creative abandonment, the other of expressive suppression. The former will rob us of surprise. The latter will rob us of truth.

In this dying light, Grounded 2 may not be a revolution. But it is, at least, for now, the most honest game we have even if it is just a blueprinted out sequel. Like the bases you build in it.

Opening

Imagine buying a car, parking it, and then waking up one day to find the dealership repossessed the driveway.

”Nice car”
”Thanks”
”Sad about the pavement though..”
”Ya”

That’s basically what happened when Ubisoft decided The Crew didn’t deserve to exist anymore. People lamented but one decided to come together and create Stop Killing Games, a consumer rights campaign that’s less a quiet plea and more a sledgehammer made of angry wallets. Nevertheless, sadly no power to demand collection of any kind. Its a weird thing, a great idea sadly toothless because it was more of a spur of the moment idea, pushed by the internets now easy access to digital boycotts and signature collection campagins. Does that mean its not worth it? No of course not.

The Birth of a Movement (and a Million Furious Gamers)

Back in April 2024, YouTuber Ross Scott launched Stop Killing Games after Ubisoft unceremoniously executed The Crew. Now I think we all can ask the question, where in the HELL were all these people when the game came out? Looking at concurrent players counts don’t show a quarter of those people showing up.

The crew though, had one major issue beyond just getting gamers minds to care about it; it required an always-on connection—even for single-player. That’s like buying a house and being told you would do the frigging plumbing. When servers went offline in March 2024, it became unplayable. Congratulations, you just bought nothing.

The European Citizens’ Initiative alone has racked up over 350,000 signatures, demanding legislative action to keep purchased games playable.

Yves Steps Up (Kinda)

After months of Ubisoft quietly hoping this all goes away suddenly, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot popped his head up like an office gopher. Kind of. During the company's annual shareholder meeting, Guillemot addressed the backlash. Well sort of.

At Ubisoft’s Paris shareholder pow-wow, someone finally asked the question burning holes in every player’s psyche: do you support the petition?

Guillemot’s answer was... delicately evasive. He said game support is a service, not an eternal promise. Nothing is forever. Not even your $60 impulse buy, apparently. But don’t worry, Ubisoft is reading the comments—probably with oven mitts.

They’re “working on” balancing business realities with consumer expectations, which is PR-speak for “please stop yelling.”

Now as you know, if you watch the podcast, I have broken down all this before and why, while the idea is sound, the Stop Killing Games Motion started dead already. A lack of strong core narratives driven by excellent counter argument defensive measures means it falls apart almost instantly and is really nothing more than a digital version of a picket sign that can be ignored by hitting the home button on your browser. But it can be strengthed for its next go around. And that included feeding back into the systems that would meet the “playable after company abandonment” statute would indicate.

Fallout: Not the Fun Kind

The Crew shutdown, complete with revoked purchases and yanked digital rights, served as the gasoline on the fire. Public outcry was so intense Ubisoft had to scramble together an offline mode for The Crew 2 and even issue refunds for recently-purchased versions of the original.

Meanwhile, XDefiant, Ubisoft’s attempt at a hero-shooter, got caught out in the open, gutshot with not enough peoplea round to even care and support for that game also shriveled up. Amplifying the perception that Ubisoft’s live-service model has all the longevity of a mayfly on a grill.

Legal Grenades Incoming

In the EU, things are getting spicy. Vice-President of the European Parliament Nicolae Ștefănuță backed the petition, saying (in not so many words) that once a company sells a game, they don’t get to un-sell it.

Industry lobbyists, naturally, are clutching their pearls. Groups like Video Games Europe argue that requiring eternal support or mandating server source code is the digital equivalent of chaining Sisyphus to a GPU. According to them, the cost would stifle innovation—or at least profit margins. Of course it would impact financials in some way, we can’t magically pretend that additional work and scope doesn’t effect resources. However, getting more companies on board to try it and prepare for it and simply just test it seems apt.

The Split-Screen Debate

Unsurprisingly, opinions are split. Some gamers see this as the natural digital evolution of consumer rights. Buy a game, own it. Radical, right?

Others sympathize with the logistical nightmare of keeping servers alive, licenses renewed, and engineers duct-taped to their desks forever. Guillemot echoed the dilemma, stating that "nothing is etched in stone."

What’s Next?

Ubisoft is just one of many and as is evidenced by journalists, gamers around the world, one of the companies that are coinsistantly the easiest to kick around.

But make no mistake most likely one of the companies you love has a live service game and some dude whos only job it is, is to enter some numbers in a sequence in a massive computer to keep it running. The day he doesn’t get the command to do it. Boom its gone. What then?

The Facts

Total XBOX Series Sales Estimates: 33.+ million

Gamepass Subscribers: 35+ million

If you looked at those numbers like a dog hearing a weirdly pitched whistle you’re not alone. It makes sense though, and I will get to that.

They’ve called it unsustainable.

They’ve called it a death spiral. They’ve pointed to layoffs, studio closures, and a subscriber plateau as signs of its impending doom. And yet — here we are, staring at another week where Xbox Game Pass just barrels forward like a half-dented war wagon that refuses to quit. Microsoft’s big bet on the subscription future is still rolling, even if the legs look suspiciously wobbly. Before we continue its also best to acknowledge that Playstation has their own service, Ubisoft, Netflix, and many others, offering games for various all in 1 prices. as well.

Gamepass is a weird situation, you lose the price of a game sale if someone plays and never buys but also if they cancel, however if they don’t cancel and pay for a couple months now your talking about being back into possibly making money from that person. They pay out for 3rd party devs and operating costs but they assuredly don’t pay their 1st party in the same ways, as those aren’t purchased into Gamepass they are built around the model of already being in there from day one.

They have good company

Game Pass added another trio of games this week — The Ascent, Minami Lane, and a freshly remastered Tony Hawk 3+4 — bringing the total to an absurd number that would break a Blockbuster shelf from the year 2000. Though sure there are a couple ripoffs in there like War Worlds instead of War of the Worlds, but beyond that, x Cloud recently expanded to let you stream your owned games, a quietly awesome feature buried under the usual marketing fireworks. A quietly added Nvidia integration on the main page on Xbox, as well as Steam games being shown in the libraries, don’t seem to indicate that anything is ready to fall.

Meanwhile, leaked numbers show subscriber growth is creeping alone — 35 million total, with only about a million new sign-ups over the last 15 months. That’s a crawl, even in Game Pass’s ecosystem of day-one launches and deep discounts. So what gives?

Gaming is a monstrous Frankenstein now.

The monster shambles forward, part saturation, part fatigue, part massive uncaring series of offerings to a user-base with less and less time to engage. Each service offering its own games across new and old, mobile, console, pc.

Then there’s the technical potholes. Call of Duty WWII got yanked off PC Game Pass thanks to a nasty remote-code execution exploit. That’s a perfect little parable of the risk you sign up for when you flood a service with content faster than you can secure it, though that issue was known for ages and yet for some reason they put it on the service like it was a superstar. Hiring a local drug dealer as your head pharmacist is a bit problematic even if his smack is good.

What does unsustainable mean in context?

Yet… the thing survives. It still works, and for millions of gamers, it’s the best deal going. For all the doomsayers, Game Pass is hard to kill. The combination of day-one releases, a never-ending library, and technical experiments like xCloud keep it propped up. Microsoft might be bleeding on the balance sheet, but their subscription dream is very much alive — battered, patched, sometimes embarrassing, but alive.

Look no further than a former lead from Arkane recently saying "Xbox Gamepass is Unsustainable" At this point every year since its inception that word has been used, even as it grows each year. Ultimately choosing another word may be wiser if your trying to pick apart the problems with this monster. Problems that assuredly exist.

Nevertheless, if a person tells you that you will die, if you do 20 years later are they a prophet, or at they a person waiting for the inevitable changes in a persons living state?

Lets look at some other comments

• Expedition 33’s Team

  • “- it didn’t hurt us at all,” and coupled with its $50 pricing, helped attract more players without undermining satisfaction.

• Gareth Damian Martin (solo dev of Citizen Sleeper) – April 10, 2024

  • “To be honest, I think Game Pass is keeping a lot of indie studios going right now. The money is a pittance to Microsoft, but to us it's the thing that means we can make another videogame”

• Masayoshi Yokoyama (Yakuza/Like a Dragon):

  • “[Game Pass] gave players a chance to experience older games, which spurred an interest in new entries.”

• “Atomfall developer Rebellion says

  • “Game Pass helped give them exposure.” “I have a very positive view of Gamepass. I think it's a great deal for devs as it secures at least a moderate success for your title regardless…”

• Zhenghua Yang & Eric Grossman (Serenity Forge, devs of Homestead Arcana) – March 13, 2023

  • “Game Pass has a lot to offer indie game developers… it’s really difficult to speculate… but Game Pass is not only here to stay, but will grow with time.”

• Lies of P’s Director

  • “Game Pass is a serious benefit… one of the best options for us to get the game into the hands of a large community of players.” “A huge number of gamers have played our game through Xbox Game Pass. I believe both parties earned a very good result from this collaboration.”

Despite the positive and negative lets discuss the huge shadowing lurker in the corner.

When comments are made that Gamepass has decreased all games worth in games minds, we now have to look at the dichotomy in the sentence.

A console and platform with, according to even the successful comments made by Microsoft about its reach, indicates that its the smallest player in terms of owners in the industry. Is Gamepass so outsized that even people with no way to interact with it, or desire to have decided that its offerings have devalued the entire industry.

If you walk into a morgue and see dead bodies you shouldn't be surprised.

The real question for the community is this: how long can Game Pass keep absorbing hits while still growing? Will they finally hit the wall where “unsustainable” becomes more than a buzzword? Or does Microsoft have the money and willpower to just keep brute-forcing its way forward?

Hit me up in the comments — is Game Pass still the greatest value in gaming, or just a bloated machine inching toward collapse? Let’s break it down together, no marketing spin, no PR nonsense — just raw honesty and deep technical talk.

The post Activision Microsoft

While the layoffs are atrocious all across Microsoft, and Xbox was hit with more than 2k of their own with studio closures, and mergers. I feel like we are seeing the repercuttions of the Activision merger strongly.
Firstly Activisions library being added to Gamepass didn’t result in the large number they had hoped for. Secondary to that, and more important, the leverage of the Bobby Kottick and Natya Satya Nadella driven purchase of Activision absolutely removed a huge nestegg that the Xbox Division may have had.
During an interview this year amonst business leaders Bobby explained that while investigating a purchase of Tik-Tok a call with Satya surprisingly ended with the microsoft Leader stating - “we should talk about Microsoft buying Xbox”

Where is Phil?

Notice a name missing from that conversation?

We will never know the inner workings of massive companies, but it is interesting that the purchase is something that has always been pushed by Phil. However, Satya has always been the driver for massive changes at Microsoft.

It has felt to me sense the Activision purchase that the entire feel of Microsoft has rolled into chaos, 4 heads not knowing what the other is doing. Not unknown in a Matrix style division business but one that hopefully will figure a way to get its head out of its collective 4 asses and figure out where to position Xbox in the future, Gamepass as it continues, and while spreading to other platformers, continues to offer positives to gamers and developers alike. A system that is opt in but hopefully doesn’t opt out.

The PC store.

The PC store. Older XBOX generations and the PC store obviously account for the higher subscription numbers than owners of Series S and X consoles, and despite the stores general apathy towards use, its almost admirable grit set towards making it suck horribly, it is, for some a massive boon in game savings.

Everyone thinks something different

We find ourselves at an impass game players yearning to save money, their spending stylings changing over times, versus developers who are fighting tooth and nail to stay relevent and fluid in a slightly shrinking gaming industry as AI removes invester money by billions of dollars a quarter.

We are 8+ years of Gamepass in. Someday it will change enough to not be called Gamepass, or it will die out. But Microsoft simply doesn’t do business like almost any other company, like it or not, they have the leverage to eat losses, and they aren’t losing right now, and keep going.
I just wish they would realize that when looking at Xbox studios and instead of closing projects that, many, were over their expiration date, they had moved staff versus letting them go.

But that’s another monster entirely.